 Hi, I'm Emma. I'm a senior VA Theater Studies acting major, but I'm in the creative producing department. Hi, I'm Daniel. I'm a senior theater education acting major. I can explain all of this. Hi, I'm Sam. I am a senior theater studies major. I'm Willa. I'm a senior communication studies and culture and performance major. I'm Carrie. I'm a junior theater studies acting major. Hi, I'm Kate. I'm a senior stage and perfection management major. Hi, I'm Bray. I'm a senior theater education major, but I'm also interested in arts and men and producing, so that's why I'm taking this class. Hi, I'm Renee. I'm a senior theater studies dramaturge major. Hi, my name is Adamu Mioke and I work with HowlRound and we're live streaming. Hi, I'm Caitlin and I'm a senior theater studies directing major. Hi, I'm Kate. I am a second year grad student with the theater education program. Hello, my name is Joelle and I'm the student engagement manager. Hi, I'm Nicole and I am the special initiatives manager for arts and women. I'm Miss Sara and I work for Polly. I'm Ramona. I'm Ramona. I'm the associate producer. I'm the associate producer of HowlRound. I'm Jamie. And I'm the senior creative producer for HowlRound. Hello, I'm Sarah Sargent and I'm a freshman musical theater major. Welcome. Hi, Sarah. So, we can jump in. Do you want to start by taking a look at the book? Question and answer from there. So, I'm thrilled Carrie's here. I've known Carrie for a very long time and I've admired her work since we were both starting out in New York together. Watching, it was, it was Medea. Electra. It was Electra at CSA. You had just taken over CSA. Electra, Medea. Right? I do the very commercial place. You're going to notice this. Yeah, we have that. There are many reasons to bring Carrie to speak to our students and community at Emerson. There are so many ways in which her career, her priorities and her work overlap with the missions, with the mission and core beliefs of the faculty and I think of the organization here of performing arts and I presume with HowlRound as well. There are just many points of convergence. The great reason for today's visit though is Carrie's wonderful book, Beautiful Chaos. So, there's a couple of things that are extraordinary about this book. One is that you have the time to write a memoir. Two is that you have the insight to write a memoir at this point in the work. So, I would love to hear more about how the writing at this point in a career and you say a little bit about this in the book in terms of what it means to evaluate it from the middle. I see you very much in the middle of the work. So, it's interesting to take the time to reflect while still in the midst as opposed to sort of a more classical model of memoir writing. The book covers not only Carrie's own trajectory through, but I think points of interest for all of us to inquire about and to hear Carrie speak about are what it means to be running a major not-for-profit arts organization in this culture at this time. What it's been like over the trajectory of it. There's some great stories that Carrie has of really facing adversity with the board, questions too of diversity and how to manage complicated political situations. And by political, I don't mean just politicians, although there's that as well, but just the politics of theater, of art, of a variety of aesthetics and how we weather all of us in our work and in our lives, what the outside gaze is and the outside criticism is versus what we deeply believe to be the right work to do. So there's much of that in here. I also would be remiss personally to not mention how important I think it is that Carrie brings up questions of family, of children, of being a working professional. I hope issues that affect all of us, no matter what our gender orientation or sexual orientation is, but a desire to have this career as well as a positive and enriching personal life, which is not something that I think is discussed in our profession enough. So I really admire Carrie for making that one of the strains in the book. So I'm touching on the tip of the iceberg, I think, of the topics that are contained here. I've asked Carrie to read some parts of the book to us as a way to start off and to hear that voice and to give you an entry. The book is being sold at the bookstore on my little plug. We have a bookstore and I think we're going to have a table with some books outside right after class as well. So we can continue sort of conversations around this for the rest of the semester as well. So that was a very long welcome, Carrie. You know, this should be for you. Because I know you're in the middle of wrestling with a lot of exactly the kind of things the book talks about and that I've been in the middle of. So I can give you a kind of spectrum of some things I wrestle with in there and then I'm totally happy to hear from you what you're curious about or what you're wrestling with and how I might respond to that. It's very funny that people call this book a memoir and it isn't really... As Millie says, it's not really a memoir in the sense that... You're not done. It would have been much easier to write it if I had already quit this job but then I could really write a memoir. But you know, it's much harder to do when you're in the middle. But it was an odd reflection point. So I was asked... This started because Jim O'Quinn, who used to be the editor of American Theatre Magazine, whom I loved, when I had been at ACT 20 years, a couple of years ago, he said to me, you know, we should do something about your 20 years at ACT and then he said sort of with a twinkle, well maybe we should really... You should write about your first year. So my first season at ACT was an absolute cataclysm, legendarily disastrous year. And he said, you know, I think 20 years later it would be interesting for you to write about that. I thought, yeah, I never have done that. I could do that. So I sat down and I did that. I wrote this chapter called Anna's Terribilist, which was about my first year at ACT. And that was published in American Theatre and then I wrote a second part to it and that was published. And then I got hundreds of letters and emails saying, oh my God, what happened? You know, not that people didn't really know what happened, but you should keep going. So then it had never occurred to me to write it as a book and it's a very oddly structured book because of that. So it's partly a kind of chronicle of the life of a woman artistic director in a very complicated city at a very complicated moment at a very large, rather troubled organization and what that was. The middle of the book is a kind of analysis of and celebration of artists who've had a huge impact on my life and my aesthetic. It's about working with Harold Pinter and Tom Stoppard and the playwrights I love. It's about my dance background and that work we created. It's about building San Francisco stories. What is it to make work about your own community? It's about the Greeks, which is where I started and about developing work. And it's about actor training and why are we training actors and should we be training actors anymore, that kind of thing. And the third part of the book is about the future. So we at ACT finally, after many, many years, we desperately needed a second stage. We have a gorgeous Bozar 1000 seat theater, the Geary. And we've never had a smaller theater, but we're a theater school. ACT is a very important school as well as a producing organization with no smaller theater. So we bought this old porn theater in the Tenderloin and made, yes, a second stage called The Strand that has a 285 seat theater and a 140 seat flexible space. And it happens to be in the vortex, literally in the crosshairs of everything we're wrestling with in America. It's in the Tenderloin next door to Twitter. So on one side is the Hall Tech Tsunami and they're all there, believe me, in their Google buses driving down Market Street. On the other side is a Filipino neighborhood, long standing, facing us is politics. City Hall, Nancy Pelosi's office, I mean, like that. They're sandwiched between the cross-country currents of American chaos, inequality, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. And that's really fascinating. So for me as an artist in San Francisco, I have to spend a lot of my energy thinking about what is the value of life performance in a place besotted with technology? Why should it matter to anyone? What would it take to get that community to partner with us to be excited about what the work is, let alone God forbid to be philanthropic, which it isn't done. That's, you know, a huge issue when you're trying to run a nonprofit arts organization. So that's kind of, well, I guess I could just read a tiny bit of the beginning. That's sort of how the book is structured. And it starts like this. So just a page. Don't worry, you're not going to have to listen to a lot of reading. But this is called the beginning. Hi. The voice on the other end of the phone is modulated with the Focom, unique to consultants and headhunters. Quote, the theater does indeed lie in ruins, but the potential is enormous. The rebuilding campaign is a thrilling opportunity to reintroduce ACT to the community. The cost is estimated to be upwards of $30 million. End quote. Behind me on the floor, my two-year-old daughter Lexi is drinking soy sauce directly out of the bottle. This is really true. I'm so sorry to tell you this. Gurgling happily at 7 p.m. in New York, and she hasn't been fed yet. I cradled the phone with one cheek and deftly swiped the soy sauce from her hand, substituting an animal cracker to buy five more minutes of transcontinental conversation. Quote, the search was well underway when we got your letter, but the board is definitely intrigued. We think you should come out immediately and meet the search committee. End quote. It was August 1991. I had a babbling two-year-old, a job I loved, at a beautiful but indigent small theater in New York. And a husband whose career in Soviet foreign policy had been prematurely cut short by the fall of the Iron Curtain. End of the Cold War, there goes my career, was the t-shirt I gave him at the time. I also had a lovely teaching position into School of the Arts at NYU, which meant there was a pool and a superb library at my disposal. I lived two blocks from my theater, and my life seemed about as full as it could get. Yet something in me had instinctively sent a brief letter of introduction to the search committee of a famed but troubled institution in San Francisco to suggest that I might be an appropriate candidate to helm American Conservatory Theater. I was not a stranger to destitute nonprofits. The day I took over the classic stage company in New York in 1987, I discovered to my horror that no payroll taxes had been paid for several years. This is really a crime, like you can't withhold payroll taxes. I learned this. And Con Ed was also about to turn off the power to the theater due to outstanding bills. My first task as artistic director was to hire the heaviest actor I knew to sit on the sidewalk grate outside the building to prevent eager meter readers from descending to the basement to quantify our negligence. I attempted a crash course on tax law at night while directing Toni Harrison's Phaedra Britannica by day, and bit by bit we wiggled out from under our disastrous tax burden. Over time, CSC had come back to life through Blind Hutzpah, a great deal of cajoling, and Harold Pinter Premier. I figured ACT would just be worse on a magnitude of five. That's two days later I found myself in a plane to California with my low-quacious two-year-old in tow. I told my beloved CSC colleagues that I was going to see my mother, a Stanford professor for the weekend, the chances of anything materializing at ACT were so slim it seemed unnecessary to tell them the truth. So oddly enough, I got this job. So, you know, the first lesson is sort of be careful what you wish for, but it's also really, really good to be young and not know what you're in for. I would never have dared take this job now knowing what I know. I was 32, I had a two-year-old child. I mean, I had no clue. The theater, the Geary, was the theater of ACT, lay in ruins from the earthquake, and I mean literally like the roof had fallen in. The MFA program was in complete disarray, and the history of ACT was like your most bizarre reality show, dysfunctional family. So this is a quick backstory. How many of you sort of know about the history in some nutshell of nonprofit theater in America? Do you all study this at all? Do you guys do in your class? So for those of you who don't, it's hard for you at your age to imagine that 50 years ago there was no nonprofit theater. We just take it for granted that this sector of the cultural industry exists, and it's changing so much right now it may not exist in another 25 years. But the reason it started theater only had a commercial correlate. It was Broadway or nothing, despite the fact that over many years in the early days, you have to remember we were a country founded by Puritans who left England because they hated theater. I mean, this is not a good start for what we know and love, right? Theater didn't start on fertile ground in this country. We have always been suspicious of it. Theater is always an agent of social change. This is not what people wanted. So it never had a kind of infrastructure. There were attempts. The group theater in New York, Eva Legalian with her own classical theater company touring, women. Very interestingly, women started these theaters. Halle Flanagan, the federal theater project, Zelda Fitch Handler at Arena Stage, who was my heroine because I grew up in Washington, D.C. and I thought all artistic directors were like Zelda, you know. There were these things, but 50 years ago, the National Endowment for the Arts was started in 1968. And it really was started in order to beat the Russians at the Cold War. So very simply, Kennedy signed it into action saying that arts and culture, that a democracy deserved a great art sector. Why? Because the Russians had ballerinas and we wanted something too. Really. So that was the beginnings of this tiny little attempt. And it will never get bigger because Americans do not believe in funding the arts through government mechanisms. And I don't really believe on a federal level that's ever going to change. Although on a municipal level, it is and has changed in interesting ways. So it's really a local fight. But the NEA began. And out of that, this notion arose that communities around the country should have standing resident theaters that were embedded in their communities and reflective of their communities and made work for their communities. And ACT was one of the first of those. So it was founded by this Maverick man, I never met, but amazing guy named Bill Ball, who had directed a lot in New York and got incredibly disillusioned by the fact that there was no training. You have to imagine back, you all who are in after training, that 50 years ago there were no MFA's except for Yale Drama School and whatever Carnegie Tech as it was called. There was no places you did not go train as an artist. It didn't exist. There were ballet schools, there were music schools, but for theater this didn't exist. So Bill Ball's genius, and it really was a kind of genius, was to say, I want to take a company of actors. I want them to be in lifelong learning. I want them to train each other and train the next generation. And we're going to do a repertoire of plays. So that he wasn't always subjected to the commercial vagaries of New York in which the notion of the industry was never to develop the art form. It was only to return an investment, right? So he puts this company together. He starts at Carnegie. He travels across the country. They're in Chicago for a while. They get to Stanford. They do a repertoire of plays, this very famous Commedia Tartuffe. They did a Charlie's Un. Very famous timing of the shrew that you can get on tape. It's brilliant. And the city fathers of San Francisco literally drove in a van to Stanford and looked at it and said, we choose you. We want you to be our theater. And even more outrageously, the Ford Foundation, under the visionary guidance of a famous funder named McNeil Lowry, bought ACT the Geary Theater and said, here, here's the theater. Gorgeous theater. Here's the company. Go San Francisco. It's yours. It was a great fit of a city and an artist because Bill Ball was a very flamboyant artist. He believed in what's called heroic acting. He loved his signature productions for things like serenno and things with panache. And he was leavened by his partner who was the school director, Alan Fletcher, who would do an IBS in every year just to sort of balance out the flamboyant. But it always was also a school. That's why it's called the American Conservatory Theater. And it was such a brilliant and radical idea. And honestly, those first couple of years, there was a standing company of 45 actors. They did a repertoire of 24 to 40 plays. It was astonishing that you could have that kind of repertoire, that you could hold that in a community, that you could engage young audiences in this remarkably sophisticated work and go out and do work in the community. So many of the things that we think we are doing now that are so radical like community engagement, Bill Ball was absolutely doing that. They were touring shows to the Central Valley, the Central Valley where Luis Valdez was starting El Teatro Cappacino where there was very little work. ACT was part of that. So the DNA of that theater is kind of amazing. However, when I got to ACT, little did I know, Bill Ball had... Sorry, I'm sorry. Bill Ball sort of went crazy. He embezzled the Rockefeller grant, put it in Gold Futures for his retirement fund, was arrested by the Attorney General of the State of California. The legend has it he was staging the passion plays. He did the crucifixion. He watched the end of this tragedy. He turned to the actress and said, my time is done, and he left. Ed Hastings, his deputy, lovely man, took it over. Bill Ball went to LA four years later. He killed himself. Then came the earthquake. Then comes me. So you can imagine. It was like, daddy, he killed himself. Uncle Ed had left, and here came the stepmother. And they'd never met a woman. I mean, truly. This had never occurred to me. In the 25 years of ACT, they'd had one woman director, Joy Carlin, who was also an actress in the company, and one Liz Huddle who'd gotten to do one play. Otherwise, you know, it just, it didn't exist, let alone a person with a child. So the child thing is a whole other issue, and there's a long chapter in the book about that, if this is of interest to you. Because, again, I was very naive, and it sort of didn't occur to me that having young children and trying to resuscitate a large theater didn't go well together. And ACT was bankrupt, and the theater lay in ruins. And it was a very sort of frightened and dysfunctional staff. So the challenge was in some way to totally reanimate the organization and raise $35 million to rebuild the Geary. And this is a challenge, because the going wisdom for those of you who are producing, if you ever end up doing capital campaigns, the wisdom is that you do a study and you lay the tracks and you build on stability so that you can go and say, to give me this amount of money, here's the bedrock on which it will be built. There was no bedrock at ACT. Bill had alienated every donor, locked them out of the theater and he didn't want them to control him. So there was not a lot of goodwill in going out there and doing this. And I also knew that I had to completely kind of reanimate the aesthetic of ACT. So I did this exercise for myself when I was hired, which I do when I teach our first year students, and there's a chapter also on this in the book, which is called, What Do You Have For Free? So I do it with our actors because I ask them to think about themselves when they first come to graduate school. What is it they bring into the room? It's sort of like saying what's your type, but type feels like a horrible box that you are put in and held to. And what do you have for free is sort of, what is the ozone around you as you walk into a room? Who are you? What do people get? It doesn't necessarily mean it's who you are, but what do they get? What do you have for free? And I do that exercise when I think about community. So I thought San Francisco, where I'd gone to college, I went to Stanford, which is another detour that's in the book. You can see from the way I talk, I'm not very teleological, so it doesn't always have a good, it has a lot of digressions. And the digression in the book, just to give you this for a moment, well I'll just give you this little moment, is how I started in theater because it'll tell you what I tried to do, bless your heart, when I got Tasty Tea. And because I have such an odd theater background. Yay, Costi! So, this is in a chapter called Aesthetic. And it's just this little section. For me, it began with the Greeks. I was not a theater kid growing up. While I had performed in high school plays, upon occasion I spent far more time in the world of dance than theater. Having done jazz and tap and modern dance and ballet all through school, I had barely seen a Broadway show or listened to an original cast album by the time I went to college. And my imagination was more occupied with the excavation of ancient worlds than with the analysis of plays. So I wanted to be an archeologist, my whole life. And that's sort of what I did when I was young is dig things up. My love affair with the theater began in the autumn of 1976, during a first year Greek class at Stanford, which I enrolled into further my archeological ambitions. My professor, Helena Foley, used a decidedly theatrical method for teaching ancient Greek. Our first task was to learn the alphabet. That's what you do. Armed with that crucial knowledge, we were introduced to the famous central chorus of Aristophanes, The Frogs. So if you know the letters of the alphabet, you can read Brekikikekskoexkoex, Brekikikekskoexkoexkoex. And that's what the frogs say in Aristophanes when the chorus, when they leap on in the play. We were reading ancient Greek drama in the original. I will never forget that moment, staring at the mysterious, unfamiliar letters and imagining a group of actors on the Athenian stage leaping ahead in glorious unison as antique frogs while reciting those words to defy the God Dionysus on his journey into the underworld. I was immediately hooked. Not only could we understand those simple words after a single Greek lesson, but through them we were introduced to a universe in which drama was a subject of momentous importance, which I thought was so amazing. In The Frogs, I don't know if you know the play, but in The Frogs, Dionysus is in despair over his word toward city and over the paucity of interesting plays being produced to energize the citizens, so he decides to descend into the underworld hoping to bring back one of the great playwrights of the past to ameliorate the situation. Imagine our own political leadership deciding to stage a debate between Bertald Brecht and Arthur Miller in order to trigger a dialogue about our current political quagmire when you get the gist of The Frogs. The play's central debate is a contest between Euripides and Escalus to determine which writer offers the greatest hope for the city of Athens. So they quote their own plays and their weight in a kind of scale. Dionysus eventually chooses Escalus and poor Sophonites has to go take a seat in the afterlife. My head was spinning when I walked out of that first Greek class into the hot sunshine of the Stanford Quad in the fall of 1976. Not only was I delighted with my newly found ability to write at least five words of it in the original but I had encountered a universe in which the answer to a population struggling with war and political chaos was better drama. Those of us who make theater in America today are constantly depressed by our own marginalization. It's difficult to believe that what we do matters or that anyone in the culture would really notice if we just folded up shop and stopped doing it. We desperately seek relevance, we look for ways to engage audiences in the art form we love to look, seem more meaningful, more central to the cultural discourse. The current obsession with audience engagement and audience participation is the latest attempt to fend off what we perceive as theater's obsolescence by getting everyone in on the game. We eschew classics in favor of contemporary plays that presumably speak more closely to the current climate and when we encourage an audience to react vocally during or after the show we think that we are inventing something new. But for me, because I started with the Greeks the idea of drama as an agent of democracy was the beginning of my encounter with theater. So it's always informed everything I did. I never thought I would run a theater. I never had any ambition to run a theater. I still wonder 30 years later why am I doing this? It's the most exhausting job. It is a job of nurturing a million other people's agendas and needs and issues and balancing finances and aesthetic and art and community and trying to hold on to your own soul in the middle of it. But I think I've kept doing it because of the way I started, which was this idea that the polis, the city at large needed a metaphor to reflect back to itself and needed something larger than itself to help create a discourse that was that would save this very fragile thing called democracy and we have to remember right now as we keep thinking our own democracy is failing and that we've become this hideous, polarized destructive bigoted culture that democracy was always the most fragile experiment. It always in 5th century Athens was on the brink of destruction and the drama played a huge role in its survival. So that's how I started and so when I came to ACT and they said here's the Gary and we're so upset to show you this because it's a ruin. I thought well I was an archeologist. I felt right at home. I loved the ruin. I loved the fact that it was sort of destroyed. That was so moving to me. Seriously. And I do think history is incredibly important. This is not something that we tend to believe as Americans. We are so forward looking. We're always about the future. We forget what happened yesterday and I think because I studied ancient cultures and that's what I loved I've always felt like it's so important to sort of hold on to those clues of what came before as we hurtle forward. So as we rebuilt the Gary we kept a lot of the rubble and one of the first shows I did outside of the Gary in this little theater we were renting because it took 6 years to rebuild. We were in Diaspora everywhere which I also, you know, I said I'm Jewish I know what that is. So that was okay. We kept all the rubble of the building and we did Antigone and there was a moment when Ken Ruda who was one of the founding actors of ACT as Ben Tover and found a piece of broken rosette that he remembered from the walls of the Gary. So, you know, that's theater, right? Theater is an oral tradition and we handed over and handed over and handed over and we learned from the people who came before us and that was sort of the DNA of ACT. So every time I disfared that I was utterly failing which I did much of the time I went back to that DNA because I thought the original idea was so brilliant and so supple and it still is and 50 years later next year's ACT is 50th I sort of call it renewing our vows because I think that's the commitment. However, it had become a very frightened narrow theater by the time I got there. So I did this exercise of what does San Francisco have for free which seemed quite obvious to me, right? It's an incredibly culturally diverse city it's 42% Asian not just Asian-American but Asian Chinese particularly but also Filipino, Cambodian, Vietnamese like that. Huge gay population which should be very good for the arts. Very urban, so not a mall culture but like public transport walking like that. Long tradition of physical comedy. So the Pickle Family Circus, the San Francisco MindTrue political theater had existed for 70 years in San Francisco. Biller, Win Jeff Hoyle, all those clowns that came out of the Pickle Family Circus in San Francisco. So that interested me very literate population biggest book reading population outside New York so interested in language and sort of formal experiments and things like that and very politically active and proactive and reactive and chaotic. So very hard place to read everybody has an agenda, everybody has a point of view lots of like that neighborhood factions. So I made this season that I truly thought was a generous gesture to San Francisco. It was not an attempt to be provocative it was not an attempt to throw down a grenade but that is what happened. And it partly happened because I was young and female and untested and from New York. So I was an object of suspicion on every level. So the first thing I did is I hired Robert Woodruff who was great director used to run ART here in Boston he had been very important in the Bay Area he did the early productions of Sam Shepard at the Magic. So Plays Like Fool For Love which I had seen as like a teenager were directed by Robert Woodruff amazing productions and also he was very important in the Padua Hills playwrights festival which was what had birthed writers like Maria Irene Fornes who was my inspiration and Millie's inspiration and I hope you all know her work and if you don't go read it right now. So I hired Woodruff and I said what do you want to direct and he said the Duchess of Malthy and I thought fantastic, great great Jacobean drama, really trench and really important go. So he was in his sort of Camille Palia phase and he did this extremely violent sexually provocative production in which all of our MFA students were splayed on desks sort of spreading their clitoris to sewn up. I mean it was like a Randy dance. Randy dance and played the Duchess and she was naked and covered in blood. It was quite extraordinary. It was a mess. You know one of the things that you have to learn you all who are producers one of the hardest things about producing is how do you nurture an artist and meet them where they live. Robert Woodruff is brilliant but in four weeks he's not so brilliant he can't get it done in four weeks. So if I had been a smarter producer I would have said this is a huge project. We have to do the timing differently. You can't produce every play the same way. Let's give him a longer process, right? He designed a set that was an enormous George Sippin two ton metal scaffolding with sperm shooting through a thing in the middle and then on the first preview they decided to put it on wheels and have it move. Again a good producer would have said you know what? No. Sorry that's a decision you should have made two weeks ago but I was like well he needs it he wants it to move. So the first intermission was 48 minutes long which I timed because it gave 48 minutes for the entire audience to come and find me in the lobby and unleash invective on how much they hated the production and me and everything I was doing. This was the first show. Epic disaster. It actually was a really interesting piece of work and if we did it now I don't think it was wholly successful but people would have engaged with it in an interesting way. But that's what happened. The second thing is I did a Dario full play because I thought physical comedy Jeff Hoyle, Joan Holden amazing. We'll do this new translation of a new Dario full play. It's about the Pope who wakes up one day and decides he believes in free abortion under me. Little did I know that San Francisco is a very Catholic city or was and that the Catholic church and the gay community were sort of caught in a kind of crossfire and this was even more of a disaster. So the Catholic church decided to pick at the play not that they'd seen it and they all stood outside the theater with these big banners that said Catholics for truth and justice. So I was looking for the Catholics who were not for truth and justice. Jews for the opposite. Jews for the opposite. And I kept going outside and saying just come see it. And you know here's the interesting thing. I thought Dario was one of the great humanists of the world. A man who has fought for social justice all his life. His wife Frank Arama, one of the great early feminist Italian workers, you know blah blah blah blah. No, it was met with utter derision. It was on, you know, there were op-eds in the Wall Street Journal. It was on the front page of the New York Times. It was a total disaster and the reason it was particularly a disaster was this. So it was a perfect storm of everything I'd done wrong. And thank God this was before the Twitter sphere I really just, that would have been the end. But when I had to do the programming in two months, I was hired in November and I had to deliver a season in January. If you ever get such a job say no. Say no to that. That is ridiculous. You cannot program a season if you don't know the community and you don't know the players and you don't know the numbers and nobody has the right to ask you to do that and you will not be successful and it was absolutely setting me up to fail. Deliberately the managing director absolutely did not want me hired. He made it really clear. He didn't want me hired. He left things in the fax machine saying to the board of trustees, I told you she didn't know what she was doing. So I had programed a season and they wanted a comedy and I had put in as a sort of place holder a Ken Ludwig play called Blend Me a Tenor. When I got to ACT I discovered in our MFA program that there had been a very unhappy incident involving blackface. In an exercise called Rock Stars in which students were asked to embody a character from the outside and a white student had done Grace Jones. This caused enormous upset in the school and there was no leadership to really deal with it. So when I looked at Blend Me a Tenor I thought, you know what? No. I'm not going to do a play. It's not even a great play. I'm sorry, Ken Ludwig, but you know about a man playing a fellow white guy in blackface when this has gone on in the school. That just seemed wrong to me and unnecessary and I wanted to just start clean. And I thought own up to it and change it. So I canceled Blend Me a Tenor and I put in the pulping the witch. So then the Catholics really thought, here's this politically correct idiot woman who's protecting one demographic in order to trash another. That was the perception. So that was a disaster. The third thing was antiquity. And I thought, okay. So I come from the Greeks. I've directed a ton of Greek tragedy. Temporal like I translated it for me. It was Wendell Pierce playing Heyman and Elizabeth Pena playing Antigone and Vilma Silva playing as Mania. It was this beautiful multiracial cast. I was really excited about it. And first I got hate mail saying we don't want to see the Greeks period. But you've never done a Greek tragedy. How do you know you hate the Greeks? Then I thought, well, they think it's going to be people in togas and slips and so that doesn't look like this. So maybe they'll respond. And then these charges started coming. And this is San Francisco. Imagine that it wasn't authentic. Like, why was it multicultural? This was amazing to me. Now, this at least I could answer because I'm a classicist. So I have, if you've never read Martin Bernal's Black Athena, this is a book I highly recommend. But what I really knew because I have studied this is that 5th century Athens was not white. And I say this to you with great passion so that you never repeat the mistake that you 20-somethings refused to do the classics because they are by dead white men. Get past it. Get past it. These are universal plays that belong to the world. And the Greeks were no more literally white than I am as a Semitic person or whatever. There were Persians. There were North Africans. There were people from all over the world living in 5th century Athens. You can see it in the vase paintings. You can see it. So to say Greek tragedy should be white or was white and that's authentic is just not even worth spending the time on. But you could certainly argue it historically if you need to do that. So that I could argue. And we talked about metaphor. That classical theater is so valuable because it's not realism. That it's a metaphor that you can populate it. They were not so convinced. Okay, it was just a really terrible year. Meanwhile, we were bankrupt and I was trying to raise $35 million. So at the end of the year, I get this phone call from the board and he would like to talk to me and I said to my husband, so I think I'm going to be fired today. Thank God we can go back to New York. I was so miserable and unhappy. And I go to his house and it's on Russian Hill and I was looking over the bay. He goes to get coffee and I sort of looked at the view and I thought God, he is really beautiful. This I will miss. And he came in and he brought me coffee. He's such a lovely man and he said, now look, change is really hard. And he said, but now you've got a hard part. I said, well, he said, so, you know, you really need to stay and see it through. And took about 10 minutes for me to think, I do. You actually want me to stay? I couldn't figure out why he wanted me to stay. And actually, I write about this in the book and here's what's interesting. I gave him a lot of credit for it because he really had my back. And the women on the board later said to me, you know what, it was us. They said, we fought for you. We stood up for you. We knew that the situation was really difficult and we believed it was going to work and we fought for you. So who knows? And I only say that because it's very unusual. Women are always fired first. Just look across the country. Irene Lewis Sharon. I could name you there. And Bogart one year. And Bogart. I mean, Joanne Ecolitis, women get one quarter to succeed and then they fail and they fail for all women. I mean, it's just unbelievable. So it was amazing that they actually stood by me and that they wanted to see something really different. So at the end of that year, we did a brochure for the next year and I printed all the comments people had sent me. I got 750 hate letters. This is before email. So I kept them in these binders, which I still have in my office, these big black binders. And I answered all of them. I really did. And they wrote saying, you know, who are you and what the fuck are you doing to our theater? And I printed a lot of that and the brochure and amazingly most of them came back. So I learned two very simple, stupid things. But again, for those of you who are producers, the first thing is you must contextualize the work. It does not mean apologize. It does not mean I'm sorry that we did this. I'm sorry I was provocative. I'm sorry I upset you. But it means share your thinking about why you did it and how you made the choices you made. So if I had said about the Duchess of Malfi, Jacobian drama came at a pivotal complicated time in Elizabethan history in which Elizabeth the Protestant was gone and James the gay Catholic King had come in and there was a lot of gender disruption of religious disruption of spying of violence against women. This is real. It was Marlowe was stabbed, you know in a pub right at that moment. So nothing that we do to the Jacobians is as violent and sexually provocative as what they would have done. But this is a contemporary director's read on an issue we face in America today which is extreme misogyny. If I had just framed it it doesn't mean you have to like that approach or you have to whatever. But I could have contextualized it. The same thing with Dario Fo. Do you know what I mean? Years later Dario Fo won the Nobel Prize and I got a phone call from the Lair News Hour saying would you like to go on the Lair News Hour and talk about Dario Fo? Yes! So when I finally got to go and say to the world this beautiful clown was one of the great humanists was one of the most empathetic complicated artists who believed in social justice, who believed in comedy as an equalizer, blah, blah, blah. If I had said that to this audience or why we were choosing it I think maybe again it wasn't even a great play. They didn't have to love the play. They would have understood why we did it. So it started a thing we do at ACT for every play called Words on Plays which is a whole book we make on every play that's all the context of the play. It's also online. So interviews and production history and photographs and artist statements and anything we can do to say to an audience before they come, here's the landscape. By now this is sort of standard but it wasn't when I got to ACT and that seemed and the other thing is just that you really have to show up as an artistic leader and you have to stand there while they scream at you in the lobby you know and it's in the ladies room oh my god this is the best way the best way to hear what people are thinking I don't know how it works in the men's room because it's a little more public for you guys we go installs so we can listen and I would just sit and listen to these people talk and you know it's really upsetting we are in a profession of endless rejection and humiliation we just are but to hear it and acknowledge it was interesting because it also told me these people actually wanted this theater to succeed. They weren't Philistines they were confused about what I was trying to do maybe or surprised or startled or frightened or all those things that can happen when you see a play but they were they were there and in the end I have to tell you it's the best audience in America and the only reason I never thought I would stay ever in San Francisco all these years I raised my children there that's my community I never thought I'd stay but I stayed because the audience is totally extraordinary. We do the most sort of outlandish repertoire in a thousand seat theater and they come and they really are invested in it but it took a long time so another thing I really learned is if you believe in community you cannot drop in I think there should be a residency requirement for artistic directors I think you should live where you work I think you should raise your kids there if you're going to have kids I think you should shop where people shop and walk where people walk and listen to what they're interested in because that's the beauty of it it means sometimes when I'm you know on my bike someone will stop me and say you know that moment in the second act what you know and you just think oh my god leave me alone but it's sort of also amazing that people do want to engage and they do want to talk to you if they actually believe you're part of the world that they're in I also think I have learned in my long you know I've been running a theater since I was 26 years old that audiences are smarter than you think be careful that you don't go around denigrating subscribers they are the bravest people out there they're actually the ones that say I'll commit to seven plays even though I don't know what they are I don't do that to you I've almost never subscribed to anything staying we have and it's really easy to say oh that awful theater and their subscribers be very careful be very careful those people are taking a gamble when they do that so I always think you know sort of look up to the audience slowly we rebuilt the Geary it was an amazing journey many sort of amazing things happen along the way and when we got to 2008 to the recession it was a huge reset as it was for every arts organization so you know the world just collapsed and again I think because I'm a woman I always take it personally I always think it's my fault I always think I'm the one that's failed even though I sort of listened to Obama talking I thought well he's got a big problem too but I really did I would watch his speeches and think how does he stay so cool about this how does he not panic and at that moment I started to wrestle with another thing that's sort of big in the book which we can talk about it's a huge commercialization of the nonprofit theater so the solution to the fact that there is so little funding and that these large foundations like Ford and Rockefeller that used to get the theater don't anymore has been across the country a desperate attempt to create commercial product that will go to Broadway and hopefully create some kind of revenue stream down the road for the theater at hand it sounds great my experience did first hand because my first gig was an intern in the casting office of the public theater with Chopin in the end I think it's a total pact with the devil and I think that that it doesn't sustain the field so for example at the public he had had a chorus line so there was an amazing period at the public where a chorus line paid for everything the public did and those were very heady days as Hamilton is paying for the public theater right now and that's fantastic Hamilton is amazing it isn't in the long run a solution to how to run a theater so when chorus line ran out the public theater absolutely hit the skids and that's when I came to the public theater and it was deeply demoralized nobody remembered what the mission was and it was such a great theater and they had to sort of start that again the same thing happened to the long work after Witt you remember Witt no you're probably too young they did Witt it was a terrific play the long work lived up Witt and then Witt stopped and then what so this is like crack it's incredibly addictive it's a great high and when it works it's amazing it's also really destructive and it's like most startups you can invest in you know ten musicals that you think are gonna be the solution to your theater maybe one will land and the other nine probably don't now why is that a problem why should that matter lots of theater fails that's okay here's the only thing you have to be responsible to as an artistic director and it's absolutely everybody's call I'm only saying what I feel for my theater you have to stand behind the choices you make every step of the way not just choosing the play but how the play gets done and if it's a commercial production enhanced by a Broadway producer they pay the bills and they make the determination of what happens about who gets fired who gets hired what it looks like and they give the notes they should they're paying for it so the three times in my twenty two years that I've done this I've ended up feeling like I really failed at the end of it even though one of them really made money because I couldn't stand up at the end and stand behind it the choices that people were seeing on stage were not mine I had sold my theater to the highest bidder and it was money but in the end I didn't so for me that wasn't the way to go it has I guess worked for other theaters there are lots of theaters that do it in different ways but I think it's something to be very wary of in the American theater particularly I guess because I'm so old and naive I really believe in the nonprofit theater being different from commercial theater if you want to have a career in commercial theater fantastic do it amazing but there should be an alternative that has other objectives and when you lose sight of those objectives then there's a real blurry kind of lost sad feeling and then we wonder why audiences don't seem passionate about what we're doing this is something I endlessly wrestle with and to be honest you know if ACT were founded today would they choose a thousand seat theater probably not these big institutions in big buildings I don't know that that's the gestalt of right now or that that's what people are really interested in I have found in the strand in our new theater a radically different feeling in the room you know it's in a really really sketchy neighborhood it's a huge glass exterior with a giant LED wall that all kinds of content are printed it has a cafe that's open all day so all kinds of people come through it we've done very different kinds of material in there and I think for a contemporary generation that is lonely and spends most of its time behind a screen intimacy counts and so being in a smaller theater where you feel close to the live performers is delicious and satisfying and beautiful and maybe that is the future of the theater and I think we have a lot of questions to ask about these big institutional theaters you know so I think it's kind of a great thing in the contemporary theater that there are lots of much smaller suppler organizations coming up and I think it's good to push against the hegemony of the institutional theaters I also think a lot of good can come out of institutional theaters and there's an essay I really recommend to you because I think about it a lot by Zelda Fitzhandler that she wrote for American Theater Magazine it's called Wither Theater like Wither W I T H E R and Wither W H I T H E R and she does argue that within the envelope of the institutional theater because the structure is there for the artist if it is an artist centric organization amazing things can happen as opposed to having to go out when you're 25 and start your own theater and spend most of your energy on infrastructure which is a great thing to do if you have the appetite and know how to do that and start your own thing amazing but it's a huge part of your energy towards just building the envelope figuring out how to market it finding a space how do I pay my rent within the institutional theater a lot of things have happened and one of the great things that's happened for those of you doing arts education is the content provision of arts education in America so when I came to ACT we didn't provide that content we did loads of student matinees we were deeply embedded in the school system because we assumed that arts education happened in the schools too when I was little you did plays in school and you painted and you danced and now that we have everything is teaching to the test everything is metrics everything is measurable there is very little appetite for arts education in the school even though there are dozens of studies that show that for example music education completely correlates with mathematical numeracy and literacy that in schools where kids are truant the day they show up is when they have their art class we know this but we have never managed to make it policy so what's happening around the country it's certainly happening in San Francisco and we do a lot of it at ACT is that these institutions are the arts providers so we are in schools across San Francisco and we now have through our education programs two things education high schools of at-risk kids who are embedded in ACT so their course is called drama for social justice and it is taught by our teaching artists and our MFA students so our MFA students have a part of their curriculum that's called the citizen artist curriculum in which they learn to be teaching artists they learn to engage in many different kinds of communities and to build work reflective of stories from all over so all of those levels of ACT our downtown continuation high school, our MFA students you know in our main stage work all sort of weave together the strand it's the home for that now so we've realized that it is what now the city of San Francisco counts on is that organizations like ACT actually carry that flag that the San Francisco Symphony that does this amazing thing called music are the only people teaching school children how to play an instrument are they giving you money for that well obviously all of this then you go out and fundraise for and the sad fact and you just have to accept it as an artist in America is that you're going to spend half your career asking for money you just will and you can't be above it it is an art form like anything else it's a little scripted play and you learn how to encounter a donor how to give a narrative that is compelling but they're interested in how to make an ask how to shut up while they quiver at the size of the how to follow up and how to not be in total despair when they say no because then sometimes they say yes so yeah we raise a lot of money for our educational programs it's a bottomless pit I mean I could raise 10 million a year and only spend it on education but it's really amazing and it has completely informed everything we do at ACT so you know the last part of the book wrestles with that and I will just say this and then I'll shut up and let you ask anything you want to ask as I said we opened a theater next door to Twitter and this came about the following way which is sort of hilarious those companies, those big tech companies have workers who are your age they are all in the suburbs in Palo Alto and imagine you're surprised that after a while those workers said we live in Palo Alto we're born out of our minds it's a white suburban boring whatever community and we would like to be in the city so two things happen Facebook, Google, Apple, State in Palo Alto their workers moved to San Francisco and they spend their lives commuting in those Google buses down to 80 and taking over the mission district where artists used to live and now everybody's been displaced that's wonderful the second thing is that they had a payroll tax deduction for nine years to companies who were willing to move to San Francisco in exchange they were meant to do community benefits so these were nine companies Twitter, Yammer, One Kings Lane which is now closed so don't forget your shopping activities Spotify, Pandora Zendesk I don't know what they do but they're they're really nice because they're Danish so they're sort of socialist so they believe they're nice they're the ones that have been nice to us the one company so they're all there and they all moved in and it has been an eruption so 50,020 somethings have moved to San Francisco in the last two years and in a way it's an amazing thing it's an amazing thing to live in a city where all these people want to live and work the industry they're working in is really time intensive and very risky and provides all their needs so they never leave the building they have cafeterias and bowling and dentistry and yoga and dog care and bike care and whatever else in their buildings so my goal in opening the strand was to really radically change that neighborhood when I ran CSC in New York hard to believe because NYU owns it all and it's really fancy but it was the drug street you know 13th and 3rd was like you just didn't go down there except if I drug sort of go to CSC so CSC helped as arts groups always do change a neighborhood and I thought the strand could be this great bridge so I go visit Twitter with my little hat in my hand asking for support you know they are so clueless that they didn't even realize the strand is red it's like a red clown nose in the middle of Market Street it's not shy, it's not invisible it's not our just spot Twitter's like right on the corner I said hi you know we're from ACT and so you know we're the ones opening that theater down the street huh well you know have you seen what's going on throughout during lunch no I mean it was absolutely unbelievable complete blank no recognition no whatever so and certainly no cash it took $35 million to do the strand and none of the money came from the tech industry like not a nickel so this is something I really think about at the end of the book and wrestle with and speculate which is right now an enormous part of the wealth being created in this country is through that industry it's volatile wealth because it comes and goes these unicorns that are valued at a billion dollars some of them have no bottom line so some of them will disappear Twitter has no bottom line I mean it has no profitability in five years it could go but that is a big wealth engine and it has done one thing which I think for us as artists we have to really think about it has really co-opted our language so words like creative innovative disruptive these now belong to the tech industry they belong to that industry we have seeded the language so it does no good to go into one of those companies and say we'd love you to know what we're doing it's so creative they think they're the most creative people they think Twitter is a cathedral that they are the creative problem solvers maybe they are and so that doesn't carry any water with them they also I have stopped ever using the word nonprofit in that sector when you say nonprofit it is just equivalent to loser they don't get that they are amazing nonprofits all over the world doctors without borders whatever you want to come that are doing radical and amazing work in that universe nonprofit is just like saying I give up so I don't say it anymore I don't even say that ACT is a nonprofit but it's really a quandary theater you have to have what they call a gateway you don't just suddenly say one day I want to see theater or do theater it used to be that people had gateways experiences as kids you either got to be in a play you went to see a play or you danced or you painted a painting or you played the violin or you were a jazz musician or something and you had that feeling that rush that happens when transformation occurs and an audience is mesmerized and that was your gateway experience if you never have that in school and you go to a university like Stanford where my university where a lot of these people go Stanford has no distribution requirements you can get through Stanford in four years and have practically never read a book if that's what you choose the appetite to be the first to do a startup and have your first IPO when you're 20 is huge less than 6% students in Stanford are humanists any humanities forget literature and theater I mean political science psychology anthropology history less than 6% so imagine what that campus feels like right so then they graduate then they go work for twitter so who am I to walk in and say hi we're doing this amazing Filipino play next door it's called monstrous it's by Phillip would you like to come see it why would they go there's no gateway so that's something I've really wrestled with what is that what is that one thing I did is hire a really young guy right out of Stanford so he knew all those people he is Filipino he helped me do outreach on monstrous the Filipino project we did in the fall he did a Filipino-American open mic night every Thursday night during the run he curated the whole thing and he got everyone to come and that suddenly got that neighborhood turning up they left work at 11 at night and they turned up at the street it's a really tricky struggle and it's a value struggle as much as anything else you know and it doesn't do any good which we love to do in San Francisco is load the tech industry and throw eggs at their buses and be furious the problem is you know it's not their fault this is how this group of people is going to be employed they're not the villain we have to figure out and it's the same thing for putting the humanities at the center of the university again why should anybody take it seriously why should it have value we can't assume that and we have to be as rigorous and committed to the kind of sustaining of the arts as people are about other disciplines you know so that is also there in the book and I talk a little bit about that about academic theater and about the perception of theater and how we teach it and think about it it's always made me really sad particularly in a place like Stanford where let's say 60% of the students are engineering majors engineers are just people who make things like we make things we are makers we are crafts people right play right W-R-I-G-H-T like a boat ride right we make things mechanical engineers build bridges chemical engineers put you know together why is it that it's perceived as lesser or or fluff or uninteresting to make a play if we taught play writing the way we teach engineering really rigorously not about how do I feel when I read this play which is frankly uninteresting and not so important to begin with but what is it to make a play stand up what is that what is the theatrical event which we do a lot of in our school and on our main stage we start from nothing we make a piece what is a piece of device theater what are the rules by which it operates how do you make something theatrically viable right what is virtuosity how do you attain it is it useful those are all incredibly exciting rich things and I think you know if we taught engineers how to write a play that stood up the way they build a bridge maybe they would be more respectful of us and what we do instead of thinking theatre is the thing I do that is mindless where I can get an A so I can go back to my real subject and my real discipline you know so part of what I've learned in this journey with that industry sitting next to us it is often demoralizing we are not natively at the center of their thinking or of interest to them it's really different from when I first came to San Francisco where the philanthropy as it is in most parts of the country where Jewish families and it's a huge part of Jewish culture always has been arts and education big fight for that so when I came to San Francisco it was the Haas's and the Goldman's and the Levi Strauss fortunes and they were deeply committed to the arts their children are not philanthropy is a learned activity it doesn't just happen and it also now is always tied to metrics to give if they can quantify what they're going to get back and this is a very interesting thing that has always been a struggle in the arts so again for those of you who are going to produce or who are going to run theaters there are two ways to get people to give money there is the extrinsic argument which is give to ACT because every night that a thousand people go to ACT a thousand people park in the parking lot it boosts the economy it employs hundreds of people it keeps the neighborhood safe those are extrinsic arguments and those are valid and important then there are the intrinsic arguments which are actually much more compelling but much harder to quantify which say why should you give to a theater because the experience of theater is transformative this theater generates empathy and imagination because in a climate of divisiveness and hate theater is a bridge all of these things which we know because we make it and we experience it so we believe it but that's really hard to quantify so if I give ten dollars do I get ten dollars worth of empathy and if I give a hundred dollars do I get a hundred dollars worth of imagination how do I quantify so for many years in the grant writing world how many metrics how many diverse audiences did I get in how many places do they produce how many butts and seats how big did the budget grow quantify quantify quantify and what the Hewlett Foundation found which is really interesting is that no matter how you try to train your donors people give from the heart I know it's stupid and counterintuitive but like those faces on the milk bottle what changed the immigration debate in this country of the little boy lying around on the coast and for a brief moment people opened their hearts because that image of that child captured their imagination more than the statistics at six million Syrians are living in exile which is our responsibility and we should do something about it do you know that image so that is something arts can do but it's really challenging and the argument of intrinsic value is you know it's kind of the fight of our lives to actually articulate it in a way and then invite people in to experience it in a way that makes them converts and then makes them feel part of it so they will go out and proselytize you know and believe that arts and culture are a central part of the sector and I would just say one last thing about it because I think this is really the fight of your generation if you go to Seattle so if you go to Seattle you can go to the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and I'm sure you all know about that foundation the billionaire billionaire billionaire Bill Gates hugely philanthropic extraordinary philanthropic industry they employ about 800 people and they have a public space on their ground floor so when you go in and you can look at their projects it's really interesting and very inspiring but there is a huge gap so I walked around and I walked around and here's how it goes like there will be something on the wall that's all interactive it will say malaria the problem, malaria the obstacles and then you can tap on all kinds of things like lack of safe drinking water lack of draining of swampy whatever lack of mosquito netting insect repellent this is exactly what's going on with the Zika virus in Brazil people just had the money everybody to pay for insect repellent lack of education blah blah blah that's what they call it not the solution, the solve and then they give you the solutions so the way they think about philanthropy is identify the problem look at the obstacles, solve it nowhere in that lobby anywhere where arts and culture represent nowhere we are the absolutely invisible sector so that billion dollar industry of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation we're not even on the radar screen there's an amazing aha for me I thought wow so why is that and I think it's because we aren't a problem to be solved we are the problem I guess, arts are always the problem we're always the troublemakers but you don't solve it you don't solve theater like you don't solve education which is why Zuckerberg put a hundred million dollars into education in New Jersey and was completely puzzled why didn't it work look, I paid all this money how come it didn't work, it doesn't work that way our sector doesn't work that way and this is what's so challenging how do we invite philanthropy when we are an ongoing investigation that is very ancient that's existed for 2500 years you know but that isn't going to be solved it's only going to be iterated and changed and evolved and wrestled with and thought about but it isn't we can't list the obstacles and then say here's how we solve it and so somehow we're not on the radar screen of those thinkers and I just leave you with that because this is your field you're going into it, it's your generation that's something to really reckon with the good news is we're a really scrappy ancient profession and you know other things haven't defeated us so hopefully this won't either but it does mean we have to think about it in ways that are smart and not get so self-indulgent and polarized and self-identified and self-pitying and whatever that we think we are entitled to be artists nobody's entitled, it's always a big fight you know and it's always going to be or that we deserve special dispensation from the culture you know we have to create room for ourselves to matter and I think okay that's maybe enough yeah so you mentioned having kind of a difficult first year at ACT how did you manage to deal with all that either without losing your mind or if you did lose your mind how did you live with that and still be able to go to work every day? that's such a good question the first thing that's a total gift if you can achieve it other life if you can have a partner in life and if that partner isn't in the theater that obviously it's fine if they are in the theater they will understand what you're going through if they're not in the theater it's sort of an amazing balancing act you know I have a crazy wonderful husband I met him at Oxford when he was writing something and I was directing so he was in a play I directed and I know he's had many different careers but he's not in the theater so there was always that moment where he would say okay enough I've heard enough about that board member enough about that difficult actor enough about whatever I'm done let's talk about the news or something I truly think my children say in my life it is incredibly hard to have children in this field and it's not just a women's problem but alas it is still primarily a women's problem I don't know why this is a generation that it was with mine but I mean I had to hide I have a section in the book about this my daughter was born in 1989 the day the Berlin Wall collapse she's a real called war baby 10 days before I was directing a pinter play that he was in the room for and I don't know what I was thinking I don't know what I was thinking I had no child care thank God she slept all the time and she was hidden in the dressing room and I knew he didn't like children and it was a play called mountain language about a political prisoner who's never seen his child Peter Rieger was playing the role pinter did not think peter was really accessing it and suddenly pinter got up having never acknowledged this child walked to the dressing room picked her up in her carry cart brought her out put her on the table in the room and said in this very bustle provoked her by this peter this is your child you've never seen her you've been imprisoned here for no reason you will never see this child that's the nature of your distance now play the scene that peter was like he started to cry Lexi didn't wake up, she didn't cry at all he did the scene baby picks up, goes back to the dressing room never forget her it was unbelievable and I've always thought children are really useful in rehearsal ever since then and I try to welcome children into rehearsal but you know they're not welcome in most cases we are an industry that has done zero about child care zero this is reprehensible when you go to an NRA convention they have child care you go to a TCG conference there is no child care or if there is you pay for it now you tell me who in the theater has the money to do that name me anybody it's unbelievable that we haven't dealt with this we are the most labor intense profession and we work the longest hours so either you choose not to have children and that's your choice and if that's your choice you're happy with that grade but it shouldn't be a choice because you can't make it work I'm in the middle of doing a big gender parity study with the welsi centers for women about leadership in the lord theater and one of the reasons I care about it is at least if you're the artistic director you have more control or the executive director because it's your theater I didn't want to be a freelance director because I didn't want to be in a different country or a different city every six months so I chose to be a leader of a theater so that I could actually have children I don't understand why the dial hasn't moved there's still less than 25% of artistic directors of lord theaters in this country are women it makes no sense to me I just don't get it and particularly women of color or people of color that's even much worse so that is something we really have to think about anyway but the flip side is the best thing in the world when you've gotten a terrible review or when your board hates you or when the audience hates you is to come home and hold your child that's the person who loves you unconditionally and it gives you so much perspective they don't care what the press said they don't care it's just so miraculous and amazing and now my children are 21 and 26 and they're still miraculous to me I still feel like everything I know is because of my children I'm such a popular culture, illiterate I'm a DJ so everything I know about music I listen to his music I follow him on SoundCloud I go to his gigs I mean he's paid for half his Columbia tuition off his music I thought okay I better learn something about this so you learn something from your children which is so humbling they tell you you're full of shit all the time it's why I love having a school because people call you on things all the time so that was really helpful they were great they knew I was really suffering and I was not much older than they were now I'm so old I look at them and I'm their parents age but when I started I was much closer to my grad students so you know I say at the end of the book the only thing I can ever recommend to anybody in the theater is to be resilient it's the only thing that saves you and how you develop that muscle all the time you will always feel you failed you will always feel somebody else did better whether it's bad reviews whether it's not getting the role you want whether it's not getting a grant you wanted and somehow you sort of have to figure out how to bounce back so my first year you know I just tried to go home and try and leave behind and the one other thing I would say is this if you have somebody who will mentor you you have to give as much as you get when you are mentored mentoring is a very complicated relationship if you have that in your life that will also save you so my mentor for 35 years has been Olympia Dukakis since I was very young I met Olympia when I was young I directed her when I was very young I went to her theater she ran a theater for 19 years called the whole theater in New Jersey I watched her run a theater with her children in a very complicated time I watched her try and sustain a marriage when I came to ACT she came and worked with me she's on my board you know she was always the kind of ballast so when I would go to a board meeting and they would act like I didn't know how to read a balance sheet and treat me like a little girl and I would call her up and say Olympia they think I don't know what I'm doing it's 20 years it's like so great it's 2,500 years of patriarchy you think it's going to change now for you but I mean it was like oh right it's not about me she also there's a poem in the book by Lorca that is Olympia's Touchstone and it always reminded me which is really about audience which is it goes something like for the artist life in a cup of beauty for an audience so that in drinking it they will know themselves you know and so Olympia's work is always about audience and what that relationship is so you know having somebody you could pick up the phone and call and really be honest really helps it also helped that I always had a working mother so your generation this may be different I'll have working mothers my generation that wasn't so true so she got it and when I would call my mother in tears and say my daughter went to the JCC to kindergarten and the first day I sent her with a ham sandwich this is how out of it I was and they sent this horrible note back saying this is not an appropriate lunch at the school or you were supposed to make challah on Fridays and I was always the one that bought the whole foods in the bag challah and I would say to my mother oh my god all the other children have homemade challah and I brought the antennas you know and she would say just tell them I don't compete on that level you know and I always thought that was such a great thing I wanted to have a t-shirt that said I don't compete on that level because you will be asked right to be all things to all people so when you're a parent you're supposed to drive to the fucking soccer games and you're supposed to turn up with late cupcakes and whatever why? you know the fathers are never asked to do this why should you do that? it doesn't mean you're a terrible parent but you are made to feel that you are a terrible parent and this is just true of everything women do what is called institutional housework this is something I learned very early on meaning look at academic committees I'm sure it's true here guess who runs the committees guess who brings the coffee look around and guess it's almost always women so one of the little things you have to check for yourself is am I doing this? and I still do it all the time I find myself driving artists around it's not a terrible thing I'm a Jewish mother I like people to be happy I take care of people I want my theater to be a home I want people to be loved but by the same token I know that that is the expectation what happened to me last week I had John Douglas Thompson great great actor at my theater doing satchmo I'm doing the audience exchange with him at 11 o'clock he's sick I'm worried about him partly selfishly because we don't have an understudy and we're making a fortune and if he's out I'm going to lose a lot of money and partly because it's John and he's sick so what do I do? I put him in the car 11 o'clock we drive to Whole Foods we buy ginger, we buy lemons, we buy tea and I'm driving it back to his housing I stopped the car and I looked at him and I say this with love in my heart I said to him because the play started at Longworth with Gordon Edelstein I said Gordon would have done this I just really asked because I thought is this what women do? We drive actors around 11 o'clock and buy them tea because we're worried that they're sick so you know you think about it all the time I don't know that there's a right answer but it's just you have to at least be aware of what how do you behave what else do you want to know no wrestling with your creative life I guess what I've been really thinking about a lot is after I leave college how do I have a creative life how is that something that I cultivate if I don't get cast in something or if I move to a different place and find my new community about how do I personally cultivate a creative life and feel fulfilled throughout that creativity it's such a great question yours is a very entrepreneurial generation which is a kind of wonderful thing so I think you are much more adept than we were at making work for yourselves and with yourselves and that's fantastic we have YouTube and social media we have email or computer so the things you're able to do which is go on the web and do a crazy web series and write comedy or post yourself on YouTube doing something or gather any way that you can do all that is fantastic and I think you all are amazing at it in ways that we weren't at at all amazing at it so any way that you don't expect somebody to come up with work for you even if you're a successful actor with a successful agent you cannot sit by the phone and wait for the stuff to come because it's just not going to happen it's too competitive an industry and there are 100 people that are sort of like you so that can be depressing or you can say okay so how are all the ways that I can both generate my work generate work which means maybe that you also write as a director maybe that you're a literary manager somewhere maybe you're a company manager somewhere and you look after other artists early on in your career it may be for instance as a young actor go work in a casting office that is the most eye-opening thing you know that was my first gig I had two early gigs in New York one I was the secretary at the International Theater Institute which is the best job I ever had thanks to Martha Martha Kwanye was my heroine she was another mentor everybody walked in Lev Doton who's about to do his check off here and you must all go see it because he's a genius I met him when I was 21 sitting in the office I brought him coffee he told me everything about his theater we drank vodka I listened to how he trained his actors Meredith Monk walked in Indonesian puppeteers walked in African dancers walked in I mean that was like because I'm a big internationalist that was the best gig and I was just the secretary the second was I was the casting intern at the public theater so I just sat and watched a million auditions that is an incredible way to learn you watch actor after actor just come up to bat how do they do it are they prepared how do they take direction how does a director those of you in the room who are directors how do you give direction in an audition there were directors who said nothing but seemed intuitively to get it immediately they're directors who talked way too much it was fascinating so these things are useful to learn right how does that work any gig you have in a theater will teach you how the theater is run and the more you know as artists how the rest of the industry runs the more effective you're going to be when you go into rehearsal so those things are really helpful and then I would say see as much work as you can see if it means ushering fine if you usher see the same play ten times and then ask yourself what has changed it's the requirement of RMFA students that they come to address rehearsal opening night and closing so they watch how does a play evolve how does an actor keep a role fresh so those things are really helpful to you as a young actor keep a journal write it down so you remember questions that you have you know and anything you can volunteer to do like do a reading of a playwright that you like turn up at a new play development place and offer your services get to know those writers that's gold writers desperately need actors be the actor the go-to actor that those writers want and then if you can keep taking class if you can if you want to do it it's great do some singing do some movement keep taking an acting class or take a language class so that somehow you feel you're still learning and that in those dry periods and you will have loads of them the fallow periods are just as valuable as the working periods that's where you fill up your sponge you know and you travel or you learn something you didn't know or you go do a stupid job that you didn't think was useful at all it's something you know what I mean so it's okay to have fallow periods as an artist unless you're running a theater and then forget or a theater department then you never have a problem because other people are creative around that's the lovely thing other question they're used to the Jewish mother model here yeah I mean I'm desperate to move to New York so I'm wondering if you can move I know you've been in San Francisco for a long time but I'm wondering if you can speak to the climate in New York for non-profit theater work now and what do you want to do? I want to act but I also want to do everything else you know I mean I went to New York you know when I was 21 having no training and knowing no one and because I was so naive that's what I did it's really hard to say because the climate is so different you know you really have to have an income unless you have a trust fund or parents who want to support you so it's really expensive it wasn't expensive you know on my secretary job I had a $300 apartment in the East Village and you know and so I paid for myself that's how we live but you can't live that way anymore so just know that but don't be naive getting a really good day job that pays that will also give you the flexibility to do theater is not that easy and you are going to be living far out of the city so you're going to be commuting an hour from a story or something if you're lucky or in London City or whatever again unless you're really lucky or unless you have money so those things are real so you have to decide how much of my energy do I want to spend just staying alive how much of my energy do I want to spend trying to make work you know and if you go to a city like Chicago that is cheap you will spend less of your energy trying to pay the rent that's just what it is you know you can get a three bedroom house in Chicago for 1200 bucks so you live with three friends not a big deal you can't get a studio in New York for that you can't get a parking space in San Francisco for that so those are just realities so that is just something there are circumstances so you have to evaluate that for yourself if you are coming out of theater with an undergraduate degree unless you're in musical theater to think you're going to find acting work in New York is going to be really hard because you are competing with graduates of serious competitive MFA programs with agents that's who you're competing with where youth counts is LA much more than New York so if you want to capitalize on the fact that you're really young that's your industry and you know I always say to actors who audition for us who really want to work quickly if you're between 17 and 25 and you want to work immediately you probably have more chance doing that because that's what television looks for young and beautiful and then you can go get more training if you want to if theater is your thing and you don't want to go get more training right away you have to think as an actor in non-equity where are the companies you can work non-equity so you look hard at that you can go to be a bat at the flea but you won't get paid anything you can go work at target margin with wonderful David Hertzkovitz which is non-equity you can try and be in the non-equity company of the public theater but you're competing with MFA graduates who are non-equity you can work there are lots of wonderful small theaters even a lot of them are equity so you have to sort of keep your eyes out and say okay where are those places that look for people like me and again you know can I start by doing readings by you know but a lot of it will be free labor you know your chances of getting a paying gig as an actor coming out of undergrad going to New York are probably like 2% if you're in musical theater that's different interestingly that's a different arc to in a career because young you're producing in dance and you're young and you've come out of an undergraduate program that's really valuable for about five years and then you hit a wall and you have to it doesn't mean you won't work again but you have to then really reevaluate but that's a different trajectory in terms of doing other things in the theater about producing and things like that there are all kinds of opportunities and if you're willing to sort of first you have to find the places that you feel a kinship to and I just urge you to do your homework don't walk into a theater you haven't really gone online and read what they do and if they do complicated devised work don't say what you love is Ibsen it's just not going to help pay attention there's nothing more irritating as an artistic leader than taking the time to interview somebody who doesn't know the first thing about your theater or who writes Dear Mr. Perlov I throw it out if you can't even take the time to know that although my name is spelt like a man I am a woman then don't come and interview at my theater do you know like that is the minimum requirement figure it out do your homework you guys are brilliant researchers you're Googlers this is your generation do it know who those people are know what they're looking for these are overworked exhausted people trying to hold their theaters together come and offer help be the person who can help who can make a difference who can bring energy don't be the person that says I need I want what can I you know what I mean seriously you have stuff to bring if you have stuff you're excited about if you have scripts you're interested in if you have an idea that something that theater is doing excites you and you'd like to help make it happen or you're great at outreach or you teach young people or you notice that they also do you know participatory theater and you'd like to help set that up or you're willing to whatever offer that you know but whatever you can do to be value-added will be a great relief for the staff people who are all post recession doing six jobs because everybody's been cut and they're trying to do it all and that's just what you have to recognize so don't say things like I'm new to town could I have an hour of your time to have coffee no sorry they don't have an hour of their time to pee or see their children know that use the interview well if you get five minutes use your five minutes you know ask good questions listen bring coffee bring coffee is always a plus food yeah kind of going off of that we can see that's L.A. theater L.A. theater there's a lot of theater in L.A. that's really good it's going through a huge rupture right now because of the 99 theater the seat rule changes so you know there used to be a provision that if you had theaters under 99 seats theaters did not have to pay a living wage this has been an enormous public battle and a lot of it's been on hell road in which equity reversed themselves and said that those theaters had to pay actors a living wage had to compensate them differently and the theaters themselves and a lot of actors who worked at those theaters said this will make these theaters close down they won't exist anymore and so it'll be interesting to see what the future of those small theaters is in L.A. but there's a lot of interesting stuff happening I was just there I just went to the Odyssey to see a really interesting piece you know there's small theaters all over town it's much cheaper to live so you can live in Matt Washington or something you know you have to recognize if you're going to do theater in L.A. that it is always a poor cousin to the rest of the industry so even at wonderful companies like Anteas in which actors do classical theater they always double cast it on the assumption that somebody's going to get a TV gig and leave so that's just what it is you know and it's somewhat demoralizing because you think really you care about this so little you would leave but they have to that's why you're in L.A. nobody moves to L.A. as an actor to do theater right you do the theater to keep your soul alive and keep your instrument going but you're there for the rest of the industry so you just have to recognize that success looks like getting a TV series not like being in a play which doesn't mean there's not a lot of really good theater it just means it's not the dominant industry so it's not very well paid and it's not it doesn't have the respect that theater has in other cities like Chicago, Minneapolis, Seattle, San Francisco DC where there isn't another industry yeah I'd like to hear a little bit more about what it was like working with Pinter on his work how you feel like his style of theater has the ability what it says and brings to in shifting modern perspectives great question well aside from the Greeks Pinter is why I got into the theater I took this class with Martin who wrote the book on theater at the absurd and I read my first Pinter play and I was gobsmacked it was a universe I had never encountered and I still think nobody has ever written like that lots of people have tried he was influenced most by Beckett nobody's ever written like Beckett either but Pinter is different from Beckett well let me think about this here's what I learned working with him so you think the plays are abstract even though you read his essays like his famous essay about what are the plays about the weasel behind the cocktail cabinet what does that mean and he would say my plays are not about ideas that you can put on a shelf or I never know the biography of my characters before I write them they are mysteries to me and I am there to excavate them but it was hard to believe that until I actually worked on the plays and until I actually met him so for Pinter his plays are distilled realism now he has an absolutely acute poet's eye so they are not cluttered with detail they are absolutely stripped away they are like boxing rings and they are always about predator and prey you know they are about power they are a zero sum game so somebody wins and somebody loses and they are about sheer action and life in the moment that's why they are so thrilling and nobody has ever written like that so I was doing the birthday party do you know the birthday party? have you just done it? you just did it? if you don't know the play it's about a very weird beaten down guy named Stanley and he is at a bed sit run by this absolutely loquacious nutcase called Meg and the implication is sort of creepily sexually that this older woman is doing something with him upstairs at his bedroom but you don't really know and she is married to a man named P.D. who is a deck chair attendant at the beach and one day there is a knock on the door and two men in bowler hats come and they are called Goldberg and McCann it is absolutely like your classic Jewish joke and Irish men walk into a bar and Goldberg is very charming and McCann is very taciturn and scary and he spends most of his time sitting in the corner tearing strips of paper and you think why is this so terrifying it's paper and it goes through you like a knife it's extraordinary and they meet Stanley and they decide they are going to have a birthday party for Stanley and they invite Lulu who is the neighbor and that's it and they have this birthday party in which Stanley is basically psychologically tortured and there is an interrogation that is unbelievable done with big smiles and they say what have you done with your wife I haven't got a wife, you haven't got a wife why have you got a wife what about the Alba Jensen's Teresy where have you put your like this it's unbelievable it's interrogation from hell so Pinterest in the room and we are working on the play and I did this very spare set and it was at CSC so it was a thrust and his plays were always done in a proscenium but this was a thrust so I had to actually make the staircase that went upstairs because you would see it at CSC he was captivated by this staircase what was happening up those stairs to the point where as Peter Rieger went up the stairs he said Peter I wonder if you might do something for me if you would just stop on the stairs and turn around and say to Meg what a lovely flight of stairs so Rieger was so thrilled because he actually got to say a new pinter line now David Struth there and says Harold is Stanley Jewish because there is a lot of invective about this in the play and pinter thinks about it for a long time and then he says perhaps and he didn't say perhaps as if being coy as if to say I'm not going to tell you it was this what he recognizes so profoundly is that human beings are complete mysteries not only to themselves but to other people and that the no ability of someone even someone you love or know well or live with is impossible to gauge so it's only in the silences between language that you begin to see cracks where somebody is exposed and he wrote and said there are two kinds of silence the loquacious endless speech that masks real feeling and those real silences which are marked as pause or silence where the whole bottom drops out and the world kind of stops and in that moment that is true and frightening and vulnerable and exposed and then the mask goes back on and we go forward he's British so he loves games the English love games all kinds of games word games, crosswords, rugby, cricket, sports that's how they think so everything is a kind of game so in the interrogation what he said to the actors was if you ask if you accuse somebody of enough things they will be guilty of one of them that's like so it doesn't matter which of the things that they accuse Stanley of being or doing you decide is true as an actor David Strathairn who was playing Stanley had to decide certain things about was he a pianist did he have a nervous breakdown did he go there's such a brilliant speech where he says they were all there that night but then the concert hall was locked my father was interested he came to see me what is true did he ever play that concert does he have a father that's what's so thrilling in the end they accuse Stanley of enough that one thing cracks and they break him and that's what they're there to do it's terrifying so if you know Pinter's biography he was a very poor Jewish kid in Hackney during the war not a place you want to be in a very anti-Semitic, very violent Britain is at war, there's rationing there's no money he is sent with the kinder transport to the country, he hates countryside he still always did so he wouldn't stay there, he was terrified so he came back so he was pugnacious his attitude to the world he's also incredibly charming and very sexual so the plays are very sexual you can just tell this by meeting him and the Jewish thing is really important so one of the things I learned from him is he's fascinated by people's secrets now you all know this as an actor the most useful thing to have as an actor in any role is a secret hold on to your secret you don't have to tell anybody else what your secret is but it gives you, as you sit in a room as you listen on stage it gives you your own inner life so one of the secrets in Pinter is that these characters are always passing Goldberg changes his name all the time he'll say you know I tip my hat to the toddler so I walked down the street and I'd sit down and my mother would say sign me, sign me and there on my plate what did I hope to find the nicest piece I could fill to this you could ever hope to find on plate and McCann will say I thought you said your name was Sammy she called me, sign me do you think why do the names always change so this is such a classic thing about passing Jews after the war and I learned this because we had a girl in the play called Wendy McKenna, an actress and we would go out after the show and Harold would say McKenna Irish she'd say no we'd go back to McCann hey Scottish and he knew there was something odd he wouldn't let it go and it turned out her real name was Wendy Rosenberg and it really was a created name and he knew it like he could smell it so that's who he was and so being in the room with him was so amazing he loved actors he was incredibly helpful not about psychology but about behavior so just what we were talking about earlier about your monologues he would say things like I was staging the party scene and I would say Harold it doesn't feel threatening to me something feels wrong with what I have done here what is it and he would look at it and contemplate and he would say you know Irishmen always drink alone and really what he was saying is it's too convivial, McCann is there drinking with them no put him somewhere else and the minute you had the party going on and you had the hulking Irishman in the corner tearing paper it was like completely terrifying you know or Jean Stapledon would say to him why does Meg ask P.D. to read her the newspaper out loud what does that say about their marriage is she lonely do they not love each other anymore that's how it was Jean Stapledon and again he sort of always Ponson thought about it and he said to her I believe she's forgotten how to read now that is a great note that's something an actor can play do you know what I mean so specific it was like well that's what it is she's hungry for connection he's always reading the paper she can't read it so she says things like is there anything nice how's your paper is there anything nice someone's had a baby today boy or girl boy oh what a shame I thought it would be a girl you know like this because she can't read it so that was amazing he was extraordinarily scalpel like in how he approached the theater crystalline amazing relentless fabulous no detail that wasn't useful no move that wasn't useful somebody standing up in a room suddenly changed the entire dynamic of the play so be judicious don't move where it's not intended someone with their back to the audience how much power that was he's an actor he was an actor great actor he was a great director so it was just thrilling to me it was like you know one of the great things about being with a writer is that voices everything so you can analyze and analyze and then suddenly you're in the room with that person and you think oh that's what it is you know I realize that I've done a lot of work with Tom Stopper like 12 stopper plays with him in the room what you realize it's so interesting when you meet him that you think it's going to be so daunting and he's so intellectual and he's so clever and he's so smart and everything else he is a foreigner for whom English was his second language so he learned English and it's a very conscious thing for him he's incredibly shy so language and wit is a smoke screen for an incredible vulnerability it's not cleverness for cleverness's sake he's a flirt he's an amazing flirt there's real sweetness under there and there's a lot of stuff on the surface so when you spend time in the room with him the nature of those plays becomes immediately clear you know and I thought about this in the book but it's just so interesting finding a voice finding your own voice and finding the voice of a writer is really thrilling and if you can meet that writer and listen to their tempo rhythm and be with them suddenly the plays do not seem abstract you think oh that's how to do that that's what Bill Irwin says about Beckett I never got to meet Beckett but I've done a lot of work on Beckett with Bill who did meet him and he talks that way we're a time okay thank you so much well thank you all I don't know if the book's in the lobby but it's in the most door you want me to go out there Mila?