 He obviously does not do as many Zoom calls as we do, although I can't believe he doesn't. Hi Tony. He's on Zoom calls all day, all night. We're watching him work. Hello. Hi. Hi. Have you unmuted? What happens now? I say things like, I welcome everybody and then I talk about how fabulous you are. And then we work and then we talk. I mean, one of these little squares on my screen, I'm in the square next to yours. I know there are a lot of, there are a lot of little, it's like a little postage stamp. Just think of me as being everywhere. Hi, Jim. I go. It's like romper room. It is. Shall I begin with my intro and then we'll, we'll take it from there so we can. We can talk as much as we want. It's okay. Just, just believe that I'm here. Can you hear the sound of my voice? I do. It's so great to see you. All right. All right. So here we are. We, I'll do, do the little spiel for the intro of this show. We're watching work. I'm Susan Lee Parks. We've been doing this show for 11 years, mostly in the lobby of the public theater, although we do it all around the world. We've been supported by the public theater in this endeavor for all of those 11 years and recently how around a few years ago, how around came on to support our live streaming thing that we started doing a few years ago. And now both the public theater and how around have joined forces and they are supporting this endeavor. So we can do watch me work a lot, a lot, a lot, a lot. And what's so excited about watching me work. We have special guests and today we have a very, very, very special guest. It's Tony Kushner. Thank you so much for being here. We all know who Tony Kushner is, but I'm going to say I'm going to read his bio anyway. Tony Kushner is an American playwright author and screenwriter. I know this is where you get embarrassed. He received the Pulitzer prize for drama in 93 for his play Angels in America, of course, and then brilliantly adapted Angels in America for HBO. He also has co-authored many screenplays among them. The for the film Munich, which is brilliant. And he also wrote the screenplay for the 2012 film Lincoln, which was also brilliant and beautiful. Both films were critically acclaimed. I wasn't the only person who loved them. He received Academy Award nominations for both for best adapted screenplays. He has received the National Medal of Arts from President Barack Obama. So and, and, and he's, he's brilliant and loving and kind and supportive and especially in times of yeah, we love you Tony. What we're going to be doing today as we do every day, but especially when we have special guests, we are going to work together in whatever kind of work, whether it be writing work or whatever, we're going to work together and then we're going to take a few, uh, several minutes to talk with Tony about his writing and his work. And then we will open it up and Tony will take questions from you about your writing and your work. Okay. And just so everybody remembers, watch me work. You know, we like, we talk about our own work. We don't have time to talk specifically about something specific. We have written, but we do talk general questions about process and all that. If you have a question during the question time, Audrey is going to tell you how to get in touch. Go Audrey. Hey everybody. Um, when it comes to our question portion of the evening, all you have to do if you're inside of the zoom is click on the raise your hand button, likely in a participant tab at the bottom of your screen. If you're on a laptop or the top of your on an iPad and we'll call on you. Um, if you're watching on howlround.tv, you can tweet at us at at watch me work SLP with the hashtag howlround H-O-W-L-R-O-U-N-D and, or you can tweet at public theater and why or write to our Instagram. And that's all fabulous, fabulous. Okay. So I have my timer here. This beautiful thing. And I'm going to set it for 20 minutes and we're going to work and then we'll come back and collect up. Okay. I like your little ring you ding thing. Right. All right. Did everybody maybe get some work done or did you pretend really well? To make your mommy happy. Yeah. Okay. Yeah. Okay. Those are not as if you have a smile. Okay. So we're going to, we're going to, I'm going to ask Tony a few questions about his work. His creative process, which he hopefully will answer because we all, we all love and adore you. And then we're going to turn it over and Tony's going to take you guys as questions. Okay. So the first question I have for Tony, if he wants to answer is what are you working on right now, man? You mean, what was I writing just now? Or I've lost you. Yeah, I was mumbling. I mean, what, like, what are you working on right now? Like what were you writing? If any way you want to answer that, some of us are more private with what we're working on. So you can. Oh, I see. Okay. Well, sorry. I'm still trying to find you. But if you go to the scroll to the first page, she's in the upper left corner, I think. Right by you. I'm like. No, not on my screen. I'll wave my hair around. I'll find you. Well, right now, let's see. I mean, to be honest, what I was writing right now was. Oh, there you are. Hi, Susan. What I was writing for my 20 minutes was a, what I've been working on all day. I've been writing about Larry Kramer. Yeah. Yeah. It was, I had a very long and very complicated relationship. To Larry and. I'm just, I'm trying to put things in. In order, I guess. So it's a sad day. Yeah. And, but otherwise. I'm working on a bunch of different. Movies and TV things. And. I think maybe two plays. So I can, I can tell you what they are. But I don't know. If, if it will help you talk about them more specifically, you know what I mean? Some people, everyone's different. Well, I'll, I'll, if people want to ask about them I can answer them. I mean, they're just there. There's a, for some reason there, some of them started out as screenplays. I turned into limited series. Because I write very, very long. now at a point it seems like economically where it's kind of almost gotten easier to convince people to let you do a limited series on a streaming service than a theatrical release film. So at least at the moment, I'm pretending that they're all gonna be eight or nine hours long. I'm in various stages. One of them is something I've been working on about three years now that I'm trying to get finished. And I have another one that was a screenplay and I'm now actually I'm turning into a certified mini series about the kidnapping of a Jewish kid in 1858 in Italy that I wrote as a screenplay for Spielberg several years ago. And then various things have happened but now we're really moving towards making it into a mini series. So a lot of that's already written. And then I have this new thing that I'm starting on that's, I won't go too many specifics but it's in part about the big New York teacher strike in 1968, 69, which is an event that kind of transformed I think many features of the American political landscape. And I think I've always wanted to write about it and I think I found a way to do it. I'm writing a co-writing it with my friend, Antonia Lasky. It's my first attempt to really co-write something with somebody and then something new that I'm working on with Steven that I'm actually legally not allowed to say anything about, but it's exciting. It's something that we're just playing with while we wait to see if we're ever gonna be able to release West Side Story because it's finished. And it was supposed to be released in December and nobody knows. Congratulations. Oh, thanks, thanks. I think it's really, really good. And he's really filled with it and we don't know what to do now because when will people ever go back into rooms together? Right, right. An even scarier question for people in the theater. Yeah, yeah. We'll be working on a new play, I hope I am. Well, if you say you are, to my mind, you are. I'm drawing. Yes, yes, yes. I'll help you hold space. That's what we do here. We hold space for each other. So welcome to that. I've heard about it for years. Yeah, yeah. Well, yeah, it's what's happening. Yeah. I was frustrated because I thought, well, I should be writing, but what I really want to do is to watch you write. But it's not about watching me write. It's actually about you writing. I don't think I've ever seen you write. Yeah, well, it probably looks much like what you do. We bow our heads and pray for God's blessing. And do this. And do this. Yeah, but it occurred to me years ago that I had never seen other writers write either. I mean, you might pass someone in Starbucks, but where you can sit and watch like Glenn Gould play the piano or Richie Havens or Jimi Hendrix or whatever, you can see people you revere, do their thing. I've never really seen a writer write. So I thought, well, why don't I just do that? Yeah. I mean, it's interesting. It's like the tip of the iceberg. You're watching a kind of physical manifestation of some enormously complicated process, huge parts of which are essentially invisible. So it's, have you ever been like, if you've ever got interviewed by the BBC, and they're completely unembarrassed by asking you to do fake things? Like they'll say, why don't you pretend to be coming home? Or why don't you pretend to be cooking food? And they always say, why don't you pretend to write something? And so you have to sit there on your laptop. Anyway. Oh, that's cool. But my belief is that in, by, I mean, in this context anyway, by performing the tip of the iceberg as you call it, we open the door for the real thing. In this context. That's a very cool idea. I mean, that's the idea anyway. But it's about you. This is about you. So you open the door on West Side Story Watch. I'm glad you have. You've written and you write all kinds of beautiful things. You write beautiful essays. You write beautiful plays, beautiful screenplays, teleplays. And do you have a preference? I mean, you go across, you cover the waterfront, you know? I don't have many essays anymore. I think I sort of decided a while back that I was an okay essayist, but not that I didn't know that anybody really needed me to do it. So I've sort of fallen out of the habit of doing that. I write introductions to plays now. I really, like I did the 60th anniversary of the Glassman Adjury. Or I did the introduction for August Wilson's Seven Guitars. And that I love are Mark Crowley's Boys in the Band. For Larry's plays, the destiny of me and the normal heart. I mean, I love playwrights and playwriting. And as you know, I mean, I love writing about your work. Work that really means a lot to me. So I do that. But I think that probably the thing, I don't like writing at all. I hate writing. I think it's awful. I really should have become a nurse. But I think the thing that I feel most at home doing is writing plays. It's just that that feels most like the real thing. I hate writing. Sorry, I'm not gonna let that slide. I mean, because- You've had this conversation before. You know- Because I know we've never had- There are many things that's unnerving about you. Yeah. Well, I mean, it's painful, but I don't hate it. But you, why do you hate? I mean, you hate, you really? You really do hate it. I do. Hey, maybe when I get into it, I don't hate it in the process, but I find a kind of great relief when I'm done for the day. And it's very hard for me to get myself to, I mean, I try all the usual tricks like the Hemingway trick. You know, you don't ever finish your working day by finishing a scene. You go until you know what the next thing you're gonna write is, and then you stop leaving it out unwritten. So when you come back, you have something to write and you're not looking at a blank page with a wondering what the next idea is. You, you know, I do the- I've told many people this when they said they're stuck. You know, you just go back to what you've written, reread it and start correcting the typing and those mistakes, because as soon as you start moving words around, your writer self will get engaged. But I find it very, I've also learned that even though I know all these tricks, just getting my ass out of the reading chair to the desk is hard to do. And, you know, I think it's a, you know, it seems like a silly nothing thing to do, but of course, all of us know because we write that you're unhinging a very carefully constructed rickety contraption that you've spent all your life assembling. It's the thing that you put on or put together inside of yourself to go out into the world and function and have relationships and have fun. And to really write is to go inside and to sort of unhook those buckles and stays and let things that you really believe your life depends on, coherent, to become a little incoherent. And that's scary. I mean, that's a hard thing to do. And, you know, and the more you do it, the more afraid of failure you get, I mean, I get anyway, the more, you know, you feel like people's expectations become really high. And I mean, you must feel that all the time, but you just do your thing and nobody does it like you. So sometimes I think about you sometimes, although I try very hard, I never think about writers. I really respect what I'm going to write because if I think about, you know, Venus or if I think about top dog, then I'll just say, I don't need to write because she wrote that. I'll call you and go, get your ass out of the reading chair and get it over to the writing table. Well, you can learn that you can, I've hired people to do that. And the problem is you've hired them. So they call you up and say, are you working? Get to work. And you say you're fired and hang up the phone. And then you, so. But you wouldn't have to hire me. I just do it for free. Just do it for fun. I just do it. It's a deal. I really will, I will. Okay. Starting tomorrow, I'll get you. Yeah, I got your number. Okay. So writing is difficult and I agree. What about adapting? Do you, I mean, you've adapted your own work brilliantly. You've adapted other folks, like West Side Story. How's that feel? What is that? It's a little bit like what I was saying about writing essays about other people's work. I really love digging into writing that I admire and kind of really getting to know it in an intimate way, memorizing, all the things that you do to just dig in and you discover things about. Well, when I did, I worked on fences with Denzel. And I mean, I had enormous admiration for August before that, but there were these sort of thunder clap revelations. I mean, there are, the big scene when Troy comes home and he's gotten his promotion and he's also destroyed his son's life. And I mean, there's no playwriting. Nobody's ever written a scene better than that. You start out thinking you're watching a celebration and there are these little clues that his wife is giving that something's wrong, even though she doesn't know yet exactly what's wrong. And you start out in this moment of what should be the most exciting, joyous moment in this guy's life, recent life anyway. And by the end of it, his world, he has destroyed his own world. And it's in a 20 minute scene that just goes, it's breathtaking. So I love doing that kind of thing. I mean, the frustrating thing with fences is, I very timidly would suggest, what if we just add this line or what if we do this? And then Denzel would say, no, we're not going to do that. It's better. And it was just, it was unimprovable. So it really is basically, all we did was talk through where different locations might be because it's, you couldn't be all in the backyard like they like to play, but you couldn't touch it. What about angels? What about angels? I mean, that your own work. Every time I brought Mike Nichols a new thing that I had written that I was excited about, he said, that's really interesting. That's really good. Let's just go back to what was in the play. It's better. So we left it alone. When I did Mother Courage, which is a play that has a very special place in my own personal pantheon, including some plays by you, I wanted to do an American actable version of Mother Courage with lyrics that would fit Janine Tazori's score, but also lyrics that would fit the Paul Dessau score that was originally written for, which is incredibly unpleasant music, but pretty great. And that was all I really wanted to do. I think it's one of the greatest plays that were written. And I didn't, you know, there wasn't very much. I felt like I could, I didn't want to change anything. I just wanted to make people hear the play that I love so much. In English, in American stage English, when I did Pierre Cornet's The Illusion years ago, I mean, Cornet himself said, this play is a botch. It's terrible. Do whatever you want with it. And so I took him more at his word, although there were things in it that I, so it depends on what you're adapting. It's, West Side Story was great because it's an absolutely astonishing work of art. It's a masterpiece. I mean, I'm sure a lot like what you went through when you dug into Porgy and Bess, you know, these things that are of their time, but, you know, art transcend, I mean, art is always of its time. It's bound by history. It's bound by all the foibles and pitfalls of history. And yet, when great artists apply their imagination to circumstances, if they really work hard, certain fundamental truths are unearthed that we shouldn't be able to know about each other, but we are actually, I mean, that's one of the great joys of art is that it reminds us that we can know things about each other that we really, in a certain sense, have no right even to know. And I'm just, I'm, you know, what I loved about working on West Side Story was the way that it started is this idea of making a musical tragedy, which is very different than making a sad musical because Rodgers and Hammerstein had already done that, but they really meant to make a tragedy where the earth is scorched at the end. It is complete devastation. And then something new can be born from that. And then as they began to work on it, they, and they based it on Romeo and Juliet, and then they made this interesting sort of step. It was Bernstein and Lawrence, the two leftist people in the group who I think decided on this. The minute they decided it would be in part about a white gang and a Puerto Rican gang, they got rid of the Capulet Montague model. It didn't work anymore because who can, the only way anybody can remember who the Capulets are in the Montague is, is the Juliet Rimes of Capulet. Otherwise, they're the same people. That's part of the horror of what's going on around Romeo and Juliet is they're killing each other for literally, they don't even know what the reasons are. They're just doing it. But the minute these guys who were good left, liberal, Democrat, Upper West Siders, decided that they were gonna write about Puerto Ricans, the model stopped working for them. And that's what produced West Side Story is the struggle to try and adhere to Shakespeare while also talking about a race that they had a horse in. They really, of course, they cared about the way that new arrivals to America were treated. And they cared about bigotry and racism and they failed in some ways and succeeded in other ways. But that struggle is, I feel like that's also true in Porgy and Bess. And so grappling with that was thrilling. And you can have faith if you're adapting something that's really a great work of art that you really probably can't fuck it up because it's always gonna be smarter and better than you are. And so I'm excited about it. I'm really excited about it. And I say it's gonna come, I mean, we're gonna see it soon and I can't wait. I can't wait. I wonder just because you talk about having faith and the world today, I mean, some of the things that some of us are noticing if we can bring ourselves to watch the news, they might dim our faith. What do you have anything to say about that? Like what might the writer's role or what might a writer's role be in times like these? COVID aside, actually just to put that a little bit aside but have any? Yeah, I mean, I don't know if I can do the COVID aside thing because it's, I mean, because I've spent the day talking about and thinking about Larry, I mean, Larry did one thing that almost nobody ever does. It's to write a great play that actually galvanizes people immediately into action. I mean, I've never understood how it was possible to write the normal heart at the moment in time that he wrote it. And there are works like that that appear periodically but they're very rare that function both polemically and on the sort of indirect, deeper, more complicated ways that art can function. I mean, I think that we, you know, I've been saying for years, I don't think that art is activism. I think you have to be an activist and an artist. I think that's not an easy thing to do but it's also not easy to be a school teacher and an activist or a nurse and an actor. I mean, you have this second job of being a citizen of a still functioning democracy. I mean, barely at this point, but not entirely barely. I mean, there's still, look what just happened in Florida with that district. I'm always nervous now to say that because somebody's gonna say, oh yeah, but they just, you know, the clan just burned the courthouse. I mean, whatever. Right, right. You're always waiting for the new little bit of ground to be lost. But I feel like we're at a point now where, I mean, I guess I have two answers. One is, I've said this before, but one of my favorite poets is Anna Akmatava and one of my favorite poems is Requiem and the way that it begins when she's talking about standing in line outside of, I think it's Ljubljanka prison, waiting for news about her husband and son who had been arrested by the Cheka and she's for the NKVD, I guess, and she's with all these other people who have been waiting in Moscow winter for months and they don't know whether they're gonna get any news about what's happened to their loved ones or they're just gonna stand their day after day starving and freezing or they may even get arrested themselves just for the crime of standing on the line. And a woman comes up to Akmatava and says, you're a poet, I hear you're a poet. And she says, yes, I am. And the woman says, can you describe this? And Akmatava says, thanks for a minute. And then says, yes, I can do that. And that's sort of, that's where Requiem comes from and I think in a way, that's all we have to do is try and dig for the truth and find something that feels like a truth, worth believing in, worth fighting for something that's recognizably true among human beings. And I think we shouldn't abandon the terrifying power of theater, which is an indirect power that doesn't, I don't think that our job as theater artists is to get people marching. We can have a hope. You and I had a conversation about this years ago in a Corbyn house about, I mean, I feel very comfortable in this role. I think you have a, I don't wanna quote you that you've always had a certain sense of, I mean, I had the same conversation with Maria Irene with the very, very great Maria Irene Fornes years ago. I guess I take a certain, my confusion is an important thing to me, my uncertainty. I live in it, I write from it. I think sometimes I think maybe to a greater degree than you do, although for some mysterious reason that I'll never understand your plays are as infinitely complicated as any plays ever. So it's not that you lecture people, but I think that you have a sense of yourself as a voice that people need to listen to as I think absolutely you are. I don't know, I feel a little like comfortable with the idea that I'm, you know, I throw things out there and I've said this a billion times, but for me, it's the model of the sleeper in the dream. I'll show you things that I think you ought to see. It's up to you what happens to them. And then maybe we're the same now. I don't know, I'm sort of, this has been one of those days when I've been talking too much, so I can't shut up. So I'll stop, but you know what I mean? It's a, I don't know, ask me something. I mean, I wanted you here with us. I mean, I didn't know Larry was gonna pass today, but I wanted you here with us because every time I talk with you and hang out with you and I'm in your presence, you lift my spirit and every time I see one of your shows and, you know, you just, you lift my spirit and you help me stay woke. So, you know, that's what you do. And I love when you talk a lot. So. When we were working on Brightroom called Day. Right. Oscar was giving notes to the cast and I remember this beautiful line from Auden. It's from his gorgeous poem that he wrote when William Butler Yates died. But there's one couplet. He says, he talks about Yates dying and Yates died in a terrible moment in 1939 when the whole world was, you know, so first Yates describes, this is the last section of the poem and it's in rhyme couplets and he describes the terrible time and then he says, you know, follow poet, follow right to the bottom of the night. And he sort of says, this is what poetry can do. And one of the things that he says it can do, he says, sing of human unsuccessful in a rapture of distress. You know, that's kind of great. So that's what we do. And I think, you know, right now, anybody who has three brain cells that are working we all have to be ready to put everything we're doing aside. We should really have to start now and make sure that we get out the vote in November and make sure that the countless ways this pack of hobgoblins and, you know, well, I don't even know what to, I mean, the vowed intention of the Republican Party is to disenfranchise millions of Americans to make sure they can't vote. And we have to fight that and we've got to get this creature out of the White House. I mean, if anybody is thinking, oh, what's the difference between Joe Biden and Donald Trump, you have to have your fucking head examined. We have to be crazy. People did that with Hillary. One thing we share is a great rage for people who said that about her. But now we've seen what this is, what it looks like when 40 years of hatred for government is now incarnated in the Oval Office. It will destroy this country. It will destroy this planet. And so the time at that, you know, fuck art. I think we have to like, you know, just find the people who know how to get people to polls, to polling places and get absentee ballots and, you know, get Biden elected. I mean, that's it. It's that boring and so anyway. We love you. We love you. You want to take a few questions from our, yeah, really, from our group here. Audrey, why don't you call on a couple of people who have questions about their work or Tony's work or anything? Who cares? All right, great. We got about five minutes. I'm going to go to Lorelai. Lorelai, are you with us? Hi, can you hear me? Yes. Okay, cool. Tony, I wrote, this is for you because I also struggle with length in my writing. My script right now stands, my draft right now stands at 138 pages and it's a screenplay. So it's much, much, much too long. And I still have, like I've gotten feedback from trusted colleagues who say, you know, valid feedback who say, you know, I need to add a few things, but right now I see the 138 becoming even longer and I have no idea how to cut it down. So I was wondering if you have advice on, are you done with, did you finish your first draft? Yeah. Yeah, it's just the feedback is, I need to add a few more things to enrich a couple of characters, but the plot is done, the script is done. It's just, I have to tweak a few things. Ultimately that. Yeah, I mean, I think, you know, the simple answer is, I don't find it possible that, I mean, some people do. Susan, Lorelai, I don't know about you, but I don't find it possible to cut and write at the same time. I feel like you have to give yourself permission to just, you know, get it out there. And there are obvious drawbacks you can wind up with a seven and a half hour long play. I mean, it can be a problem, but I think that, you know, a lot of, I mean, Melville is one of my favorite writers. A lot of what's great is discursive, is digressive. And I think it's a mistake to be too much with your blinders on. I think you get to the point where you feel like you've gotten down something that feels like the story you want to tell. And then it'll start to tell you, it'll start to talk back to you and say, I don't need this. This is not, you know, you have to develop an instinct. I, you know, I think you should only listen to a few people and they should be people you know really, really well. Don't, I mean, it wasn't anybody who wants to talk to you, but don't take everybody's opinion. Develop a working relationship with one or two people. My relationship with Oscar is essential to me in that regard. I always need to know what he thinks. And then sometimes I do what he says and sometimes I don't. But it, but I've been in constant conversation with him for 30 something years. And it's not, and when you find those kindred spirits they're few and far between, you know, when you hang on to them. But I think, you know, you're asking the wrong person. You should ask Samuel Beckett. But I, to me, 138 page screenplay is nothing. I mean, the screenplay for Lincoln was 500 pages. The screenplay for West Side Story was 240 something pages. And I didn't add a song. I mean, it's, you know, so I think, you know, give yourself the freedom to put it all out there and then, you know, be disciplined about getting rid of stuff that doesn't work, that isn't necessary as you get more and more familiar with what you've written. Because I mean, all of writing is rewriting, right? All of writing is reading. The whole point of writing is you put it down in paper and then you can look at it and then you have a relationship with what's going on in your head that you don't have if you're just thinking. That's the praxis. That's the combination of idea and action. So you have to have it out on the table to go, oh my God, why did I think I needed this? What is this? And then also give yourself time to let it gestate so that if you mean so much of what's good, I think gets ruined, either people deciding that there's an absolute page limit or by people deciding that something has to be done within six weeks or three months. It has to be done when it's done. And you have to fight for that. I think you have to fight for that. This is a good way of starving to death, but unless you're lucky, but I think it's essential. I think that those are things that writers really need to protect within themselves. And people like long things. People like stories that you plunge into and then you don't come out for a long time. I don't have this craze for plays that last an hour and 10 minutes. I mean, I've seen some wonderful plays like that, but I've also seen a lot of things that feel like a first act. I mean, it's no sin. Theater isn't easy, especially if it's theater. You can write as long as you want for television or film because they are gonna watch it on their iPhones anyway and they can watch it like you read a long book. I mean, nobody sits down and reads middle march from start to finish. You pick it up and put it down. You can now do that with the films that you're writing because that's what the digital revolution has given us. But with plays, going to an hour and a half play is not easier than going to a six hour play. Theater is as difficult to go to as writing is. It's supposed to be difficult. It's scary. It's upsetting. It's alive. Who wants to, it's much easier to stay home and watch RuPaul's Drag Race. I mean, it's just more fun. So theater is hard work and audiences, the experience of being pulled into deep into something where you actually believe that you're going to learn something true or be shown something that you're afraid to look at except in the dark and the company of a number of other people, that's what we go for. So let it be what it needs to be. Great, thank you. It's good to know that you don't think that's too long because I don't either but yeah, thank you. Well, the act is to talk faster. That's true. Also, I'm very, my stage direction sort of verge on Tennessee Williams in length. So presumably when it reaches the desk of a producer or a director, it would be pared down. So one thing quick about stage, I mean, for film, it's always weird to call them stage directions, actions, whatever you think it's not dialogue. It's like really important to make those long because you are talking to the director and every film I've made, I've made all of my movies with Spielberg except for Angels with Mike. And I've been on the set talking Steven Zeer off the whole time but there are times when I've removed things from the description of a scene just to get the page length down and then films it. And I think, God damn it, why didn't I leave that in? Because that's the, I'm talking to him. In terms of playwriting, I think stage directions are a really interesting thing because sometimes huge, long-stage, novelist stage directions are great. But I think that one of the great joys of writing a play is you're doing two things at the same time. You're writing a score for a kinetic event. You're also writing something that is read. It's a piece of literature that will be read because of Shakespeare and those people, people will actually read plays from time to time. And I mean, you can't do anything better than looking at Susan Laurie's plays because there is a way in which vast amounts of stage direction can slow down for a reader the dramatic action to the point where the experience of watching, of reading the play is really torn away. You can't have the experience of velocity that's so much a part of being on stage if they're like long, Neil does that. Sometimes they're always beautiful and really interesting to look at, but there's a little bit too much of them and you kind of want him to lay off a little bit. Miller, Williams, August Wilson are great at making the reading experience somewhat like the experience of watching the thing on stage. You always want your reader to wish that they could see it on stage and your audience to wish they could be at home reading it. And Susan Laurie, you all know her plays, but those things like a pause, a pause, or a spell, a spell, those are amazing and because they make you ask questions about what would the actor do at this moment with this and get a sense of both interpretive freedom and of an incredibly precise imagining that goes all the way through the dialogue into the stage direction. So I just think those things are enormously important and unique. You have to make the formatting and the punctuation and the rhythm of the play script really absolutely yours. Just never hand play scripts to actors in rehearsal with typos in them because they're looking for a way to not believe you and if it looks like you can't spell or you make sloppy mistakes, they're gonna think, they don't really know what they're doing and they'll start making up stuff and you don't want that. You feel like having one more question, tell me, you feel like taking forever time but you want to do one more? Yeah, yeah. It's so great hearing you talk. All right, we're gonna go to Madison. Madison, I'm having trouble unmuting you, are you there? I'm gone, hi. Hi. I'll try to make this on the quicker side but thank you both so, so much for this opportunity. I'm a student and aspiring playwrights are here and you talk about how much you love being a playwright has been really amazing. I'm really new at this so my question is after making the progress and mistakes and accomplishments and everything that you have in your career, is there any advice that you give someone like me that you can now see has helped you get where you are now that you've gone through the process of finding how you work in the industry and things like that? I apologize if that's a little too vague but I'll move for as broad as I can. I mean, you know, it's, I can't, in terms of film and I don't know, I mean, I guess that it's this corny thing but you know, if you're a playwright you've got to get it into the hands of actors and a director and get it up on its feet. There is no, it's one of the few art forms that has almost no geniuses who died in obscurity because you can't write them if you don't get them in front of an audience that you won't know how to do it unless you do it. So your great job is to write them but also to make sure that they find them. It's hard to say this now when we're all locked in our apartments but as soon as we're not or I guess you do Zoom theater all the way. I don't know what that, anyway. But I think that that matters and you know, be true to yourself on some level. I mean, I just blathered on for 40 minutes about feeling that you're sort of uncomfortable with the idea that theater is power and that you have an ambivalent relationship to power, I think in, I mean, everybody should always have an ambivalent relationship to power. If you don't have an ambivalent relationship to it, you're either, I mean, well, you're a creep. I mean, you know, but I think you have to, I mean, Susan Laurie was saying, you know, I think what you were saying, Susan Laurie, that you're sort of pretending to write always, you're the person, the deep inside of you is the real you or one of the real yous and it's making this hand move across the page and it's like, look at me, I'm riding, I'm riding a bicycle or I'm riding a play. I mean, it's an action, you're playing a part and part of the part that you should play, I think, is believe that what you, you know, believe that you are at least trying to say something that matters to people, that people need to hear, that you need to hear yourself. You're trying, you and the audience, you know, you're always preaching to the converted because who preaches in a church full of people of different faith, everybody, but all faith comes with great doubt. So the great preachers, we all hold hands together and we walk together into the dark. So that's what you're trying to do. And I think for that purpose, believe that your audience loves you and cares about the same things you care about because if you're writing for a hostile audience or you're writing for an audience that doesn't know the thing, that isn't as smart as you or doesn't know the things you know, you'll start to write down to them and it'll get boring very quickly because it won't be a play, it'll be a lecture. You know, scare yourself is important. I mean, one thing I love about working with Steven Spielberg is he's enormously wealthy. He's one of the most successful, if not the most successful film director and at least in terms of commercial success in all of history and he's, you know, considered by anybody who knows anything about film to be a pretty great artist, a genuinely great artist. And every time I work with him, we do something together that he finds really terrifying, including remaking West Side Story, which is a great fucking movie and we are, you know, how are we not gonna fail? So we're making a movie about Lincoln or making a movie about Munich, which we got, you know, it's a lot of work. He knows somewhere that as comfortable as he's earned the right to be, he wants to be scared or he's not making something worth making. So if it's easy for you, you're not doing your job. It has to be a kind of, you know, you have to dig really deep and it has to really hurt on some level and it has to cost. The audience is gonna pay for that. You know, they pay to watch us we're the sacrificial animal. You know, Breck would hate me for saying that, but it's true on some level. It all goes back to the mysteries and we're the thing that they see bleeding and bellowing and horror so that they don't have to. And it'll give them a chance to guess at what that might be like. So I think, you know, bleed and bellow. You know, you only have to do it for like four or five hours a day. And then, and that's the nice thing about it is you don't have to do it for 19 hours a day. And, you know, so there are rewards and compensations. Bleed and bellow. Bleed and bellows is a merge. We love you. We love you. You should, the chat lights up saying, oh, please ask him back. We love Tony Christian. Can I just ask? So is this group fairly consistent from meeting to meeting or is it? We have been full. I'm here, Audrey's here. You know, we've got some people who have come to pretty much every incarnation of this for the past 11 years, like Carol, like there's Rebecca in here, Jim comes often, and Julian comes, you know, but also it, what I promised myself when I started is that regardless of who showed up, I would show up. And that for me, the act of showing up is the offering is the act of faith that I try to, that I share or encourage and receive from everybody else who shows up. We would love to have you show up again in this capacity to come and talk with us about, again, about your work, about your creative process or anything you wanna, brother, you are an inspiration, a joy. Well, honey, you know, anything you've ever asked me to do, I'll do it. Well, we love you, and- Before it gets embarrassing, we'll- Yeah, well, before it gets embarrassing, let's all go back to whatever we were doing before five. Good luck, everybody, good luck with your work and stay safe and- Thank you. Watch your hands, yeah, we love you. Everybody ready to vote? Everybody ready to vote, we love you. Audrey, tell us about tomorrow. And so tomorrow, if you wanna sign up to be in the class, we will be having sign-ups online until 3 p.m. Eastern and I'll send you the link between 3 and 4 30 p.m. Eastern if you wanna be in the Zoom, thank you for- Thank you guys, what a great session today. Thank you, thank you, Audrey. Thanks everybody. Thanks again, Tony Kushner for being a very special guest. We love you guys, see you tomorrow.