 Hi, everyone. Welcome to hall round here comments. We are doing a live stream of Megan Sandberg Zakion's book launch. And I'm Melinda and I'm going to be talking with Megan over the next 75 minutes or so about her book. And I am just thrilled to introduce there must be happy endings on a theater of optimism and honesty. And I'm going to read a little bit about Megan. She is a theater director and has a passion for the development of diverse new American plays and playwrights. She's a co-founder of the Maya directors, a consulting group for artists and organizations engaging with stories from the Middle East and beyond. And some of her recent projects include the world premiere of moderate shakers house of joy at the California Shakespeare theater. Nathan Allen Davis is not Turner in Jerusalem at the New York theater workshop. And Ellen emerges is chill at Merrimack Repertory theater right here in our backyard of Boston of Lowell. So Megan's also graduated of Brown and has an MFA from Goddard College. And she's a proud member of the national union for stage directors and choreographers sdca go. There must be happy endings is Megan's first book. We hope it's not her last book. And she lives in Jamaica playing with her wife, Candice. Hi Megan. Hey Melinda. It's so good to see you. It's so good to see you. If we have been doing this at the Book Smith, I just realized where it was supposed to be at the Brooklyn Book Smith wonderful local independent bookstore. There would have been someone that introduced you. So I'm just going to step out and say Melinda Lopez is a wonderful playwright and actor based here in the Boston area, as well as a beloved colleague and friend. Yes. Well, we are we are friends and we have worked together and we're working to develop new work together. And so I'm just really, really thrilled for you and really thrilled for this book. The last time I saw you in person, we had met at Cafe Nero, Street. It was early March. You had come from teaching acting at Northeastern and we're headed home to your wife and I was bringing a group of students in to speak easy to see the children. And we spent about an hour catching up as colleagues as friends talking about your wonderful book and I read you passages from it and you read me passages from it and everything felt so normal and it's a hopeful. And so today is March 23rd and we're under shelter in place ordering Boston. Probably many people who are watching are under the same. And so we're meeting in a virtual space. So thank you how around live TV. Thank you for making this possible. And thank you to the publisher of the book for bringing us all together. I just want to say before Megan reads from the book, this is an amazing book. It's moving. It's funny. It's just full of incredibly powerful deep thinking. It pulls from a lot of artistic influences and it's full of so much love for the American theater for the fragility of actors for the power of great stories for playwrights and of course for directors. And it's a book for anyone who holds a space in their heart for the American theater for the arts and who cares about creating a culture of kindness and responsibility around stories that go deep and tell incredibly powerful truths. It's so smart. It's so smart. I feel smarter just having read it. So everyone should read it. One of my favorite things that the book does is it reaches right through the pages and sort of grabs the reader. There are these moments where the book says asks the reader, where are you sitting? I'm trying to imagine you. Are you okay? This is what I'm thinking as I'm writing. And so you bring this theatricality into the pages of this book. It feels like you're in a play. It feels like a communication, a communion between reader and author even though it's through the medium of print. And so before you read from the book, I want to acknowledge here we are. I'm in my home. I'm at my dining room table. My dog is here. My cats might come through. My husband is making dinner. Megan, where are you? I'm also at my dining room table. I have spent a lot of time zooming here recently. Yeah, I'm at my home in Jamaica Plain. My wife is in the other room with her headphones on, watching the live stream so she doesn't distract me. And I'm at, you know, my living room is over here, my, you know, etc. So yeah, I feel, and you know, it's funny, I love that you pointed to the fact that the book really negotiates with audience. I am imagining all of the people watching and the feeling that I would feel if I looked out and saw all of your faces out there. I'm very, I feel a lot of gratitude. And so I'm using Melinda as a proxy for all of these humans out there. Where are you sitting? Maybe we can just like all take a breath together sitting wherever we're sitting in front of our screens. And hopefully you have your, your tea or something stronger. I hope you're surrounded by loved ones and that you're safe and healthy. I want to introduce Madeline, who is going to be, Hi Madeline. Madeline is going to be manning the phones. So later we'll have a chance for you all to text in questions. And when we open it up to discussion among everyone, Madeline will be going through your texts and making sure that we have the best questions and the most up-to-date questions. I think that text number is on your screen. I'm going to read it to you now and I'll read it to you again. It's 617-651-1794, which you can text if you have questions. And I can't wait to let's get started. One of the things that struck me about your book is it talks a lot about hope. It talks a lot about happiness, but it also acknowledges that hope is hard and it's a responsibility. Your book is full of these launching points for these really important conversations and questions that are really, we need to have especially now in this remarkable unprecedented moment. You talk about the light and the dark and you talk about how it's a responsibility to be hopeful and it's a responsibility to talk about happy endings. What are you going to read for us? Well, I'm going to start off with at the beginning of the book. The book is published by the Third Thing Press in Olympia, Washington, and I'm fortunate to be part of a cohort of other authors that are being published at the same time and all of the covers of our books in this cohort are designed by the wonderful Juan Alonso Rodriguez and they're made from a series of prints, which are I believe many of them still are available to purchase the original prints. And all of them begin with land acknowledgement, which I'd like to read, reading from the land of the Massachusetts and the Wampanoag here. You can make a plane. The third thing is located at the southern tip of the Salish Sea on the unceded land of the Medicine Creek Treaty Tribes. As part of our work to create a culture of intimacy, accountability, and radical imagination, we acknowledge the violent legacy of settlement and ongoing colonialism and commit to cultivating restorative relationships with indigenous communities and with the land in a spirit in support of truth-telling and reconciliation and with the belief that a book can be a liberated and liberatory space that travels through time and across borders. Each of our 2020 cohort authors shares their pages with Melissa Bennett, an indigenous writer. So when you buy the book, you can read Melissa's beautiful poem that's in here. And when you buy the other books, you can read some of her other work. I'm going to read a little bit of the introduction and then jump ahead and read an edited version of the first essay in the book. So the introduction starts out by talking about, in spite of being the child of heritages with genocides on both sides of my family Jewish and Armenian, I, as the child, I was very enthusiastic about happy endings. I always wanted everything to have a happy ending. So then I jump ahead to after graduating from college. When I graduated from college, I moved to New York City and registered to vote at my new address on Hudson Street. On election day, my neighborhood polling place couldn't find my name. So I rolled, I rode my teal blue Schwinn down to the board of elections on Barrick Street. I was filling out forms in a lobby on the 17th floor when a jetliner dropped out of a perfect Azure sky and flew into a building 20 blocks south. A man next to me kept repeating, my nephew works in there. He works on the 90th floor. We were close enough to make out dark forms leaping from the upper floors of the building. As I peddle back up Hudson towards my apartment, I saw hundreds of people lining the streets, convulsing unison, crying out. I realized later that must have been the moment when the first tower fell. I watched the second tower collapse from the roof of my building. It felt like the end. I was altered by that encounter with the world's violent unpredictability, which I had previously understood only in the abstract. Before that day, I saw tragedy, violence, hate, as blemishes in an essentially compassionate universe, as aberrations that must be resisted fought against and overcome for the sake of our beautiful world. After I saw them as pervasive. I saw the fundamental chaos in the lives of the nine-year-olds in my playwriting class who were often at the mercy of brutal public systems. I heard it in the sobs of my roommate through the wall at night and in the voices of bag daddy teenagers that came over the radio in the months and years after my country invaded theirs. I looked into the faces of strangers on the streets and recognized my own devastation. Now I understood that this was the world. Unjust, irrational, cruel. But September 11th was not the end, at least not for me. Both before and after that day, I made theater. I still make theater. Sometimes, often, it seems like a deeply inadequate response to a world full of terror and chaos. But I strive to meet that world with my full and honest attention. In the collision between that striving and the whisper of my childhood longing, please let everything work out. I find myself, again, considering happy endings. What can a happy ending offer us? And now I mean an honestly happy ending, not a dishonest one. Not one that papers over reality with false cheer, but one that earns its happiness with full truth, with clear-eyed presence. That acknowledges the irrationality of the human heart, the infinite, unavoidable harms to self and others, the violence of the systems we've made to support us, but that falls so short, the maddening complexity of things that should be clear. Is this kind of happy ending even possible? One that gives us a compassionate space where grief and loss can coexist with hope and joy. One that offers us an alleviation, a space of relief where the weight of the world's terror abates momentarily. Perhaps it could act as a restorative, a tonic that refreshes and rebalances. And then two, it would need to open up space to rejoice, to be washed with pure delight, wouldn't it? In a world where everything changes in an ever-expanding universe, can a container the size of a theater and the shape of two hours be big enough to hold all this? In the face of an enormously unjust and chaotic history in present, is it acceptable? Is it ethical to believe in the happy ending? Is it possible to be both honest and hopeful? Although I write from the point of view of someone making the theater, I believe this balancing act is one that all sensitive human beings must at some point attend to. It is the essential question of how to, as Walter Lippman wrote, live forward in the midst of complexity. I'm going to skip ahead to the first essay in the book, which is called The Old Dark Cloud Comes Over Me. And the essay begins with me writing about how vividly I remember the time right before I turned nine. I was really preoccupied with the fact that I was like going into my last year of single digits. And then it was going to be double digits from there on out. And I was reviewing, I spent a lot of time right before I turned nine, reviewing all the other ages I had been previously. So that's where I'll start. I remembered being seven, sitting on the steps of our old house in Fremont. I grew up in Seattle. It's the neighborhood in Seattle. Sitting on the steps of our old house in Fremont, watching shiny black beetles march across our front walk on their way from one part of the lawn to another. Usually the beetles just scurried by. But this once there was one that seemed interested in me, crawling over the twigs I offered to it, eventually resting near my foot. Almost nine, I recalled the feeling of being seven, the sunlight on the back of my neck, the pleasure of being in company with a small strange creature, the sweet, dark smell of beetle. When my mother came outside, I asked her if I could keep the beetle as a pet. She examined it and told me the beetle was dead and I needed to come in for dinner. I did go in, but I didn't quite believe her. The beetle didn't feel dead to me. I looked for it in the morning, but it was gone. Though that had seemed like proof to seven-year-old me that my friend, the beetle, was still alive, almost nine-year-old me was not so sure. I could feel a different truth approaching. I remember exactly when I began to understand that the world's unspeakable beauty was matched only by its unspeakable horror. It was just an ordinary day of soccer practice that had happened. My soccer team was called the Unicorns. In my memory of this day, I'm wearing my shiny blue and gold uniform, although I'm not sure why I would have been wearing my uniform at practice. There was a team meeting about something, I don't recall what, and everyone got very upset. The group of players and coaches and parents standing in the middle of the field began to argue. I remember feeling filled with melancholy, wandering away from the group and sitting on the bleachers. I watched the unicorns and their adult guardians gesticulating wildly at each other in the middle of the field. Their conflict felt unbearably violent. I lay down flat on the cold metal and looked up at the darkening sky, blue with a glow of apricot at the edges, framed by a lattice of almost bare branches. The world is terrible, I realized, and here I am in the middle of it. I thought about all the things I'd heard of that were bad, nuclear bombs, greenhouse gases, starving Ethiopians. I remember that when my dad came to pick me up I was crying so hard he thought I was injured. I had to explain through sobs that I was crying not for myself but for the world. On my ninth birthday I got the one thing I really wanted, a cabbage patch kid with Auburn corn silk hair named Diza Eve Gilberta. I felt lucky. I was lucky. People said I was smart and pretty and good at soccer and I believed them. When another child at school behaved badly my mother would point out possible contributing factors. His parents were divorced, she had a learning disability. Having all the advantages of health and comfort I had no excuse for boredom, sadness, or under achievement. After all mom would say if you can't be happy who can. I mulled this over alongside the new knowledge from that day on the soccer field. The world was full of bad things and I was supposed to be happy. I was nine and knew I would someday be 10 and so on and already there was a strange dread in my belly, a fear that I would not be able to follow the edict implicit in my mother's logic. Sometime after my ninth birthday I formed a new belief that integrated my mother's doctrine and my own experience. It was not okay to be sad for myself but it was okay even laudable to be sad for the world. Using my sadness as fuel to save others allowed me to indulge the feeling of grief inside me and still be good and lucky and smart and happy. I could be the kind of girl I was supposed to be and I could make the world a better place. I could make a difference. I started with the dolphins. I knew from the mailings Greenpeace sent to our house that they were dying because of tuna. I formed a theater company consisting of my three-year-old brother and myself called the SZ Stars. Every time someone came to our house the SZ Stars offered a benefit performance gathering guests in the living room for a brief enthusiastic program. Little Eric had composed a five-line poem called Hit a Ball that always went over well. Side note the whole poem was just the line hit a ball repeated over and over again basically. Afterwards we collected a quarter from everyone present. After several months I turned over all the cash to my father who wrote a check to Greenpeace for $12 in change. I sealed it into one of the postage paid envelopes that came in the dolphin mailings and sent it off proud. This early experiment in philanthropy started me down the road I would follow into my professional life. A sense that my work as a director and producer of theater could respond to and even combat the injustices of the world around me. I embraced a stance of what Jill Dolan calls militant optimism. A persistent belief that theater can model utopian social relationships and reaffirm hope and faith. This militant optimism felt like a magical shield allowing me to venture into dark places and find meaning, purpose, grace. As a director I was drawn to projects that dealt with difficult subjects with sensitivity. Plays that made the audience cry but also left them with a tiny warm spark. Every few years I would read a new play that grabbed me by the shoulders yelling, yes, we were made for each other. So it was with a script by Lydia Diamond that had been developed at Steppenwolf Theater in Chicago. I was to direct the second production at Underground Railway Theater in Cambridge. The play, Harriet Jacobs, was freely adapted by Diamond from Jacobs' 1861 slave narrative, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl. It traced Jacobs' extraordinary life. Her childhood in Edenton, North Carolina, her persecution as a teenager by her master and her attempts to avoid his assault, her audacious false escape where she pretended to flee North but actually remained hidden in her grandmother's shed for seven years so that she could watch her children grow up through a tiny people. And finally her actual escape to the North and her eventual reunion with her children. Jacobs' story is extraordinary and Harriet Jacobs is a wonderful play. I felt both the thrill and the heavy responsibility of achieving a production that did justice to its complexity and power. I read and reread all of the research materials over prepared for every rehearsal. I wanted to capture the triumphant force of Jacobs' life in the vessel of the production. I wanted to make audiences feel as inspired and moved as I felt by her story. Lydia was making changes to the script throughout the rehearsal process. In particular, we struggled with the ending. The last scene was a moving farewell between Harriet and her grandmother as Harriet prepared after her long confinement to stow away on a ship headed North. The scene ended with a monologue where Harriet directly addressed the audience, describing the rest of the life she would find after this escape. Then the stage direction. This is the stage direction. Ensemble members have gathered around her and have begun singing a hopeful, rousing spiritual. It is not a celebration. There is rather the conviction of one who will survive. The satisfaction of one who will tell her story. Lights fade on all. End of play. We were having trouble striking the right tone for this final moment. I spent rehearsal breaks with my lighting and scenic designers brainstorming solutions that would allow the ending to lift off with that final stage direction sense of somber affirmation and forward movement. The night before we started technical rehearsals, I went over and over my script as snow flurries began to swirl outside. I couldn't seem to catch my breath. At midnight, I walked through a blizzard to the Mount Auburn Hospital emergency room and told them I was concerned I had a pulmonary embolism. They took a chest x-ray and gave me fluids. The doctor suggested that I might just be very anxious. This is a very relatable story for right now. I wanted to tell him it was reasonable to be anxious if you couldn't figure out the end of the play, but I didn't. Also reasonable to be anxious if you're in the middle of a global pandemic. The next morning, the storm was over, but when I arrived to meet with the designers before tech, I found the building had lost power. In fact, the whole block was dark. The cast huddled in front of sunny windows in the green room, running lines and waiting for the lights to come back on. They didn't. We sent the actors home before the sun set. The next day, there was still no power for all 12 hours of our scheduled rehearsal time. On the train home from the dark theater, I cried. I wondered how to honor Harriet's memory without the rehearsal hours necessary to perfect the complex technical sequences in the second act, especially the ending. I wondered if the disastrous tech weekend meant that her spirit was unhappy with our production with how we were telling her story. I felt we had proceeded with so much respect, treated her story with such reverence. What were we doing wrong? What could she object to? I took a labored breath and reminded myself that it was not a pulmonary embolism. When I got home, there was an email from Cammie Smith, the actress playing Harriet. She'd had some downtime, thanks to the power outage, and had decided to do a little research. She sent me a passage from a letter Jacob's wrote in 1867, when she returned for the first and only time to the place of her seven-year confinement. This was after the Civil War was over, after abolition, and Jacob's wrote to Edna Dow Cheney, a friend in the North. This is her letter. I am sitting under the old roof, 12 feet from the spot where I suffered all the crushing weight of slavery. Thank God the bitter cup is drained of its last drag. The change is so great I can hardly take it all in. I was born here, and amid all these newborn blessings, the old dark cloud comes over me, and I find it hard to have faith in rebels. Although I'd poured over these letters for hours, the passage typed out in Cammie's email felt new to me, as if I'd never really heard it before. Could this be Harriet Jacob speaking, abolitionist, heroine, brave and smart survivor? Were these her words even after she published her book, after slavery had ended, after she was reunited with her children? What struck me in the re-encounter with this letter was its darkness, a darkness I'd missed or ignored before. Taking in this darkness made me understand some of Jacob's other writing better. I could see that she struggled with feelings of despair and hopelessness, with shame and guilt, especially after she came north. I could see that faith especially was always a struggle for her, as she attempted to make sense of a God who would allow the horrors of slavery to continue. In spite of her belief in Christian ideals of charity and mercy, she was unable or unwilling to forgive the men and women who had participated in the enslavement of other human beings. I could see that even as I'd read and reread Harriet's words, so shocked by her ordeal, so admiring of her triumph, I'd partially erased her. This was something I'd done. It was not in Jacob's and Diamond's texts, but in my interpretation of them. Lydia's play didn't ask for a sanitized heroine. Instead, it allowed for a woman who was, by turns, impatient, full of desire, angry, a bit of a smart ass. And yes, she was also a person of enormous strength and tenacity. In her letter to Cheney, she went on to discuss the political, social, and economic situation in Edenton in great detail. Even under the shadow of her dark cloud, she never disengaged with the larger struggle for justice. All of this was reflected in Lydia's text. Cammy's email suggested that the play's final monologue be set in the moment of the writing of this letter. While our previous approach had located the monologue and Harriet's final exit on the cusp of her escape from Edenton, this version would treat it as a more distant reflection. It was a risky, unstable moment to offer up as an ending, balancing both satisfaction and despair. In the letter, Harriet feels settled about the past, but the old dark cloud comes over her when she thinks about the future. She finds it difficult to have faith that the white people around her can truly change. And this sounded like the conversations our cast had been having for weeks around the plastic folding table, as precarious an exercise of imagination in Cambridge in 2010 as it had been in Edenton in 1867. It was an appropriate place to end our play. The world's unspeakable beauty matched only by its unspeakable horror. Over the next week before opening, Cammy and I met every day before rehearsal. In those sessions, and in our work with the full cast, we went back through the play, finding places where we had scrubbed our heroine too clean. We put the texture back in. It made the play better. The story was being told more clearly, more honestly. There was more room for complexity, more space for the audience to feel. I was very proud of that production of Harriet Jacobs. I especially loved the ending, where I felt like I had brought together the elements, Cammy's performance, the music director's orchestration of the haunting spiritual, and my design team's work on a striking final image into something that elegantly achieved what Lydia was asking for. Near the end of the play, the planks were removed from the walls of the shed where Harriet had been confined, revealing rows of large glass mason jars filled with raw cotton. In the final moment, the jars lit up from within with tiny warm lights, turning the clouds of cotton into something otherworldly. And the ensemble placed a new jar in the center of the stage, an illuminated glass vessel with a small hardcover book in it. End of play. We'd finally found the ending. But long after the show closed, the events of that tech weekend haunted me. It seemed to me that without the panic attacks and the lights going out, without Cammy's email, I would have put a different production into the world, one that misrepresented both the complex history of the woman whose memory I wanted so badly to honor and the complex present moment of my collaborators. I'd always assumed that my militant optimism was a magical shield that allowed me to descend unscathed into the darkness. But was I using my magical shield as self protection, as a way of resisting the reality and possibilities of that darkness? Did my commitment to work from a place of persistent hope dull my ability to be present with ideas, people and stories that were different from myself? Did it limit my ability to be present with my own darkness? I felt that it did. It had. I was still that almost nine year old unicorn, desperately sad for the world, standing next to it, vowing to change it. Sentimentality, James Baldwin writes, is the mark of dishonesty, the inability to feel, the wet eyes of the sentimentalist betray his aversion to experience, his fear of life, his arid heart. And it is always therefore the signal of secret and violent inhumanity, the mask of cruelty. I contemplated my method of descending into the darkness with the shield of militant optimism. The entire time I was in the darkness, my goal was to either obliterate it with light, or get the heck out of there, taking everyone else back to the light with me. I had decided I wanted to change a place without ever really seeing it. This role I had committed to playing was more missionary than moderator, more colonist than collaborator. By believing that my militant optimism could pierce through Harriet's old dark cloud and cast her story in a new light of hope, I denied the very center of her experience and with it, any possibility for real contact. My hope had a directionality to it. It came from somewhere I wanted to go somewhere else. My militant optimism was too militant. As time passed, as I read and loved and directed other plays, these questions hung in the air. When I come face to face with how terrible the world is, how do I respond? How do I locate myself in relationship to the darkness? And if I release my attachment to militant optimism, won't I spend every day sobbing on the bleachers, overwhelmed by the horror of the world around me? This is where in the book, there's a little like squiggle, like a time passing mark. Hey, can you show us? Well, if I show you, I'm going to have to show you all the ways that I marked up this page. What page is it? I'll show mine. Yeah, I'll show a different page. Over here, I'll show the bottom of this one where I drew it in. There's the drawing of the squiggle. Can you see it? Yeah. Okay. Harriet Jacobs is buried with her daughter Louisa in Mount Auburn Cemetery, right down the street from the Mount Auburn Hospital ER and a few miles from the theater in Cambridge where we'd performed Lydia's play. While we were in rehearsal, Cami had taken the bus there to see her grave. I hadn't gone while we were working on the play, but after it was over, I began to visit regularly. Mount Auburn Cemetery was a good place for my questions. Founded by transcendentalists as the nation's first garden cemetery, it was intended to shift a punitive colonial era attitude towards death in the afterlife. In lieu of an austere church graveyard, it has tranquil meandering grounds, ponds and dels and hills and towers, both sacred resting place and pleasurable picnic spot. I wish I could say that I found some answers on the winding paths of Mount Auburn Cemetery, but the truth is it took longer than that. I was stuck for a while with the same questions. I'm not sure how to write about this. I kept feeling I had arrived somewhere and then realizing I had not. Have you ever taken a lengthy train trip in another country? You fall asleep and wake up, check out the window at unfamiliar landmarks, try to read signs in the language you only half understand. You keep wondering if you have missed your stop. It feels so long. So, time passed. The relationship I was in ended. Cami moved to Texas and gave up acting. People I loved died. Obama was reelected. My friend Kate with who, oh, I didn't read that part of the essay. You missed the part where I play three little pigs with Kate. Anyway, Kate had a baby and so to my delight did my brother. My niece Charlotte could kick a soccer ball even before she could really walk. Charlotte is volatile and tender-hearted, so close to the bone of her own pain, so agitated with her own joy. Watching the extremes of life sweep through her small body, I feel a deep sense of recognition. I think now of that little unicorn in her shiny blue and yellow uniform sobbing on the bleachers until her father came to collect her. On the soccer field that day, the world flickered and darkened. I felt the chaos of not knowing, asking me to step into it. As I shrank back, I saw an alternative to that terrifying complexity, the possibility that there was a right side and a wrong side, and I could choose which one to be on. I chose a side, fighting for something good. It was not a choice born from sentimental violence. It sprang from a seed of deep empathy, but it was also a choice born out of fear that locked me for years in a prison of my own optimism. I can see this in Charlotte, how terrifying it is to face the world's unwanted possibilities, how comforting it is to believe in your own righteousness. I can see how badly she needs me to hold all of her. She is not always happy. She is not always good. I feel how necessary it is to leave space for her rage, her aggression, her despair. My mother was right about the beetle, of course. Though at age seven, my child's logic easily ducked the painful truth I wasn't ready to face. At age almost nine, it was starting to come into focus. My response to the dawning realization that I lived in a world that included dead beetles was to crusade against the injustices of such a world. With enough effort, these problems could be fixed. Surely beetles and dolphins and unicorns and everyone's parents could all live in harmony. My strategy for reckoning with a world full of unwanted possibilities, vanquished the darkness with my compulsory happiness, had remarkable staying power. What I discovered working on Harriet Jacobs was that this strategy was insufficient. I owe Harriet and Charlotte and myself more than my happiness. I want to be available to my dissatisfaction, my anxiety, my grief, my despair. I want to live in this world fully, to be the kind of aunt I want to be, to make the kind of theater I want to make, the kind Jill Dolan believes in, and I believe in too, that reaffirms hope and faith and offers us a vision of another possible world, another little squiggle. And this is the last little section. It is the final day of rehearsal for our site-specific production of Thornton Wilder's Our Town. Mount Auburn Cemetery is interested in using performance as a way of activating the landscape and allowing visitors to see the grounds in a new way. So our plan is to perform the first two acts of Wilder's masterpiece, daily life and love and marriage, in the quaint story chapel, and then travel with the audience down into Hazel Dell to play the third act, Death and Eternity, among the gravestones. It's one of those brilliant New England fall days, and we are rehearsing act three, one of my favorite stretches in all of American dramatic literature, the end of Emily's funeral before she begs to relive a moment in her life and the stage manager takes her back to the morning of her 12th birthday. I'm describing the quality of presence I want the actors to have who are playing the already dead characters, how they should sit, where their point of focus should be. When I realize they are no longer looking, they're no longer listening to me. They are looking at something over my head. I turn around and perched on a tree branch above me. There is a medium sized brown and white raptor. It might be a red-tailed hawk or a red-shouldered hawk, but whatever it is, it is holding the back half of a rabbit in its talons, neatly split down the middle as if it recently divided the rabbit equitably with a friend who prefers the front. The hawk looks at the actors. The actors look at the hawk. I look back and forth between them. Everyone is still. I'm sure a few people take out cameras and snap pictures or make rabbit jokes, but the feeling of it is stillness. It's as if we were performing an idea and then the idea itself showed up. The hawk eats some of the rabbit. It seems like it will take a long time to eat it all. I don't worry about losing the last hour of rehearsal time before the sun sets. In the stillness, I can feel the echo of Wilder's words, the presence of death and of hunger, the movement of sun and shadow. Harriet Jacob's final resting place on Clethora Path is a few minutes walk from here. I visited her and Louisa before our rehearsal today. I can feel that I am now living the lesson it felt so painful to learn, how it is necessary as a director to stay in relationship to darkness. Only by admitting its possibility ourselves can we make space for our collaborators and for our audiences to find their own admission and for them to feel the related possibility, though not the guarantee, of light. Eventually, perhaps tired of being watched or tired of watching, the bird takes its half rabbit and flies away. We begin our rehearsal again. The actors playing the dead sit among the graves. Emily is transported to her 12th birthday but is quickly overwhelmed by how unaware her mother and father seem of the sublime beauty of their ordinary lives, their lack of noticing. The actress playing Emily in a bright red wool coat, tears on her cheeks, grabs the stage manager by the hands, asking with perfect urgency, to any human being's ever realized life as they live it, every, every minute, the dead do not hear her. But they are there waiting. They sit upright, alert but not stiff, their eyes in soft focus, only half seeing the trees above her head. And in the live reading at the Booksmith, there would have been thunderous applause. I'm sure that there are thunderous applause all over living rooms. I can't think of a more perfectly fitting piece to read right now at this moment, the acknowledgement of the, of the, of the veil of optimism and how dangerous that can be to live in both as a citizen and as, certainly as an artist and the tension between honesty and hope. I'm really struck by, you know, your experience, the experience that you relate working with Cammy, working with this particular play and the, the way that you are able ultimately to see what is there instead of what you wish were there. And it's a theme that gets repeated throughout the book very often. I feel like you, you grow as an individual and an artist with every encounter you have with difficult work. I have two, two questions in my head. The first one I hope we circle back to which is I want to know where this book came from, right, the journey to get here because I think you've talked briefly about what it, what it took out of you to put these ideas together. But the question that I'm going to ask now is has to do with your spiritual practice. And you do a lot of work intentionally trying to put yourself in the moment, see what is in front of you and not what you wish were there, which is the root of all suffering. If you follow a Buddhist tradition, will you talk a little bit about how your creative work and your spiritual life align and how that, how that shows up in the book a few times and a few different essays? Yeah. Thank you for asking that. It was funny. I went on my first ever silent meditation retreat in the process of sort of like almost smack in the middle of writing this. And I am so grateful, first of all, that I did. And also, I do think that event shaped the writing in a lot of ways. One of the things it did was allow me to turn my attention for a really sustained amount of time inwards. And I think the, the, the experience of attention is the one that I keep coming back to you when I think of the intersection of living theater, directing in particular, and spiritual practice or what it is for me. I, I, you know, I do believe that the most extraordinary gift you can give to another human being or to the world is your attention. And I have certainly discovered through the course of just starting really, I think my journey with insight meditation and Buddhism, to some extent, that I've also realized it's the most important gift I can give myself. And I feel really lucky because as a director, my entire job is just like to show up and be present and pay attention to literally like you had one job, you know, that is, that's the job. And, you know, you and I have worked or are working on a solo show. And I think I feel that most exquisitely in the room with the solo performer, because you, well, the one that you and I are working on, I luckily have you the playwright as another human in the room. But often it's just my attention and the performer. And I have to fill the space with the, with attending. Wonderful performer, Maurice, a manual parent who, yeah, Maurice, hello, I hope you're watching. You talk in your essay, a lamp of bridges ship, a little bit more about your process of being in the room and, and, and the gift that a director brings to a company. You want to elaborate a little on that. I found that really, really moving and beautiful. Yeah, I love that essay. I, that I was one of the hardest ones to get out. It went through so many different forms. And the thing that really, one of the things that really helped me catalyze it was reading, well, rereading actually. Chiara, I'll agree who does piece in, it was reprinted American Theater, her, her talk, The High Tide of Heartbreak, where she talks about the harm that theater can do and the, and the violence that it, that she feels like it's done to her. And she asks, can honesty be harmful? And I had spent so much time thinking about the ethics of, of honesty and like really thinking that like honesty was the most ethical thing. The only thing that mattered, you know, really looked truthfully and directly at things and be honest. And it was very helpful to receive that reframing of the ways that harm can be done. And so, yeah, the essay, it's actually going to be a version of it, an edited version of it. It's going to be in the SDC journal for all you SDC members out there who get the journal and read it. But it, but so I was, I was really glad to get the chance in that essay to like unfurl a little bit the differences between harm and violence. Anne Bogart, my, one of my favorite people writing about directing and one of the inspirations for me in writing this book writes about how making art is always violent every time you make a choice. It's violent. You, you move the chair an inch to the right and you destroy all the other options in that moment. And it was that helped me to negotiate with the necessary violence of art making kind of creative, the violence inherent in the creative act, and start to identify like, when are when am I engaged in necessary violence and when am I engaged in something that is harmful and to come to really sit down in some strategies for being fully present artistically while avoiding harm to myself and my collaborators. Right. And that involves so much caretaking of the company, the actors in the room, the designers, the stage managers, you talk a lot about that. I'm also struck with the phrase that you've used earlier in our conversations about the appropriate amounts of grief and happiness. Like, again, you're the book dances around and over and between this constant balance, right? This constant balance of light and dark of hope and responsibility of appropriate amounts of grief and happiness. And, you know, you said it earlier in the reading talking about the balance of honesty and hope, right? Too much honesty can be, can be too painful. And sometimes people, sometimes we can't recover from that. So how does the theater offer us a way forward? You know, how do we, how do we find that in this moment away forward? You, again, you relate so strongly to your artistic practice and the way art fills your life and many other ways, not just making art but receiving it. In a wolf at the door, you have this wonderful essay about tracing your awakening as a queer woman via the trajectory of Peter and the Wolf. And I want to read this quote, this thrill and terror of this musical piece that you listen to obsessively as a child. How old you're young, right? As when you're, when you're first getting exposed to this piece and you write later as a child, as a teen, as a young adult, I was terrified by what I sensed was at the door, the force of my own keen appetite, the dark carnivore in the forest. And it's a great tension of, of the hunger and as you said, the violence that goes into making new things, right? Creating theater where there was a theater before and as a director pulling these disparate forces together, the script, the actors, the design, finding that perfect image, right? That last moment of Harriet Jacobs in the book, right? And, and, and, you know, you're, you're, you're writing this ship. Yeah. Because, because you have so much personal power and, and, and intellectual clarity. Talk to me about Wolf at the Door. Yeah. And how that made you into the artist that you are. It's so funny. I think almost every queer woman who's read that essay, or at least a number of them, the first thing they've said is, oh my God, I used to listen to Peter and the Wolf all the time as a little kid too. I don't know what that's about. But, you know, that, that piece, so it's, it's, it uses Peter and the Wolf as a jumping off point, but it's, it's in large part an essay about musical theater. Note to all of you artistic directors out there, I really would love to be hired more to direct musical theater because I fucking love musical theater. And the, the genesis of the essay was trying to figure out why, why, why do I, why do I love it so much? And why do I love these particular pieces of musical theater that I love? And also why was I so drawn to Peter and the Wolf? What was it that compelled me to play and replay and replay and replay something that scared the crap out of me? You know, I was so, I would, I was so scared that in my house my parents couldn't say the word Wolf. You had to spell it. You had to say W-O-L. I'd be like, I'm scared of the W-O-L-F. It was like, you know, he shall not be named. So, and I mean the passage that you just read, it's funny. I love that you read that out loud because I feel like it took me months and months and months of writing an essay to come to that sentence. Like why was I watching it and rewatching it? Why was I watching it and rewatching it? And my wife, who's a brilliant psychologist, was really rigorous about continuing to ask me that question and pushing me to discover what it was. But I think in terms of the tying it back to the other essay, A Lampa Bridges Ship and like the violence of the director and the role of the director is that there's like sometimes excavating why you connect to a work of art is actually really hard, you know, to really go to keep going like, what is it that scares me about this? What is it that is vulnerable about this? And it sometimes, I mean, some of these essays I've been working on for 10 years and I just figured it out, you know? And I'm sure I could, there's probably things that I don't know about why I love these pieces. So the rigor, the rigor in interrogating my own responses is part of my practice and also feels like one of the hardest parts of what I do. Directing other people is easy. Right. You're used to turning your focus out into the room. And with this book, you're really, like you say, interrogating the depth of your, you know, your experience, your longings. And I think also striving to answer the question, how do we, you know, how do we create ethical practice that supports the community? And that's asking those important questions that we need to be, you know, we need to be looking at especially now. It's like when I was reading in the book and I think I got the copy in February and I was thinking, oh, this is a really good time to be reading it. I feel like right now, wow, you know, how do we, how do we answer that question about balancing hope and honesty, right? Moving forward and also acknowledging where we are and how scary it is. Not that you're only doing, like, highbrow work, but you also draw a lot of parallels with your artistic practice and your passion for Batman. Like you actually draw a straight line between Brecht and Batman. And I don't know many people who can do that, who can pull that off. Can I just read, this is a quote from your essay on the Dark Knight, the hero that Gotham deserves, which is sort of a love letter to the Dark Knight, but it's also, you know, this really great interrogation of the Janus face, the two sides. You say ambiguity and complexity, not to mention integration or intersectionality are risky. By leaving space, by deliberately crossing wires, we invite disorder and even chaos. Now, how do you live with that? Oh, it's so hard. Oh my God. I have a really hard time with it. I started writing that essay because, I mean, the breakthrough in writing that essay came from looking at all the other essays and realizing how often I was splitting things. This is, again, something that my wife was really helpful as she introduced me to this psychoanalyst, Melanie Klein, who talks about splitting a lot. And, you know, I had to really reckon with my tendency to make things good or bad with dark or light. I even got to a point in writing the essay where I was like, aha, I figured it out. Splitting is bad and complexity is good. I was like, wait a second. So, yeah, I mean, I think I had a blast equating, in many ways, equating the Dark Knight and Breck's Good Person of Szechuan and the title of the book comes from a blog to Good Person of Szechuan. The title of this book? Yes. Right. Oh, this one. The other one. Yeah. Yeah, the epilogue ends with, ladies and gentlemen, in you we trust, there must be happy endings. Must, must, must. And, you know, the other thing that I think is so interesting about that essay that I learned, this is sort of, you know, this book is also like me learning to become a writer, really. And I loved the Brecht and Batman relationship. I knew I wanted to write about it, but the essay just didn't feel like an essay. And my brilliant editor, Anne DeMarken, who is the founder of The Third Thing Press, so this will sound very on brand, always would say to me, you need a third thing. You need a third thing in that essay. So I found a third thing in a childhood board book I used to read. And you'll have to read the essay to find out how all that stuff fits together. I want to open this up to questions from people, from our listeners. I'll just repeat the phone number again, if you don't have it, 617-651-1794. And you can text in a question. Madeleine is arriving with, she's been fielding the questions on her laptop. Thanks, Madeleine. This is not rehearsed. So let's see. So is there a question you want to share? There actually are no questions, but I was kind of assuming that when we got to questions, maybe people would put in questions, but I did get some responses that said that people were clapping. So yeah, so if you want to text in some questions, we will absolutely get them. And I actually have, we were talking that was it, when was it? Was it yesterday or the day before? There's a Kushner quote about hope that we both, that I hadn't heard and you brought up, and then we rift and rift on that. Yeah. Yeah, I was reading the Andrea Bernstein's book, American Oligarch, which is a pretty stunning and disturbing book about corruption in our political system and big money in politics. And you just, you're going through the whole book and it's just, you know, hard thing after hard thing. And she gets to the end of it and has a conversation with Tony Kushner and the end of it, where they start talking about hope. And Kushner is saying, hope is an action, hope, you know, despair and hope are both actions. And we can, it takes equal effort to engage in a hopeful practice or to engage in a despairing practice. And I think that the action of hope is looking around, seeing where progress might reasonably be expected to be made. And like sort of like putting your shoulder to that, to that place, like lending your voice, lending your momentum to that thing. And I, Bernstein also talks about the collaboration with other journalists that has been contributing to her work. And there, and I have felt enormous sense of like really profound collaboration, even in the, in the writing of a book, which is so, can be so isolating. And in the, in like the making of something that so many people have, you know, that feels so collaborative. My life is walking by me. Oh, she says, say the number to text again. I think, I think the, so if you are watching the live stream, the live stream on HowlRound, the number to text is in the, like it's on the page that you went to to get the live stream. So maybe it's below the live stream or something, but say the number one more time. 617-651-1794. And that is 617-651-1794. I love this hope in collaboration and in the void, right? I mean, what we're finding now, reaching across the void, right? And, and finding ways to keep that connecting. Yeah. And I, and also the sense of like, when you find a place to you that feels productive and meaningful, that, that like lending your voice or your, your action in the world to that place is an act of hope. And I feel that about making theater. And I feel that about writing the book and being part of this cohort at the third thing press. And I feel that about like HowlRound and being part of, you know, like HowlRound is a place to me that is like, you know, one of Kushner's places that progress can reasonably be expected from. So I'm happy to be part of, you know, putting my shoulders into that. I have some questions. I have a few questions, more than a few actually. The first one is from Katie B who says it's an inspiring reading and conversation. And she wants to know if you will have book club chats. Oh, Katie B should email me and tell me what that is. Then I'll have one. Yeah, I mean, yeah, great. I know we're going to do some, like, like questions and curricular outlines and like discussion questions for each of our books. So and those will probably be on the third thing website. But I mean, the idea of people reading this book together and talking about it is pretty much my dream come true. So yeah. How does Katie email you? How does she find you to send you the email? Well, I'm at MeganSZ.com. So you can contact me through the website. There's a contact form on there. Or just text that number because it's actually, I have access to it too. All right, we have another question. Barbara from Boston was wondering, do you find yourself fighting against happy endings? Not anymore. But yeah, I've been through a long, me and happy endings have been, you know, down the road and back. So I feel like I had, I went through a long period where I had to wrestle with them and fight against them because I knew so well my own tendency to lean into something that was a falsely happy ending. And now, through the process of writing this book actually, and I really am grateful for, I'm grateful to this book for giving me this gift. I feel completely settled in my advocacy for happy endings. I feel like I believe so strongly in the potential for a space of contact and availability and mutual reaching out, as you said Melinda, that to me is hopeful and that a happy ending is not an ending where nothing bad happens. So I'm on team happy endings. Yeah, very uncomplicated now. That, another one? Yeah. People say they're interested in joining your book club, first of all. So, second of all, this is a long one from Jonathan Dent. Living in these dark times that we find ourselves in with the pandemic quarantining us and the growing realities of climate change always looming. How has writing this book changed the way you deal with the anxieties of the modern world? How do you combat the feelings of overwhelm madness that I'm assuming you still have? Yeah, Jonathan Dent is an amazing actor and playwright collaborator, working on his own beautiful writing right now. I'm as prone to being overwhelmed by the darkness as any of us are. I, there's a wonderful colleague of mine, a couple of colleagues of mine in Kansas City that always used to say an actor is someone that's easy to laugh and easy to cry. And I think about that a lot. I think a director should be that way too. And I remind myself that opening myself up to the full spectrum of darkness and pain and terror is the same space that's available for joy and grace. So that that opening is not that the more you open to one, the more available you are to the other. And as we were talking about Melinda, you know, opening to the to the appropriate amount of grief makes you available to the appropriate amount of joy. And when you feel big feelings, it means that things are high stakes. And when you feel that things are high stakes, it means that things are worth doing, worth being a part of, worth living through and paying attention to. And, you know, then when all else fails, I practice gratitude and do nice things for other people, because that always fixes it. I'm going through my notes. I turned, I think about the combination again of your, your seven year old unicorn girl and the soccer, soccer uniform and, and this grown, you know, this grown ass, powerful woman sort of holding the whole world in her hands. There's a quote that I'm going to read that I love, our separateness is painful. I can feel it, the torn apart place. And it takes work for me to reconcile it to hold us here in the tension. In one hand, the reality of our separateness. In the other, the reality of our interconnection. It is both terror and revelation. You mentioned terror. We are separate. We are inseparable. We will damage each other. We will damage ourselves. At any moment, at every moment, it is in our power to reunite. That strikes me as incredibly honest. And hopeful. Right, because it puts power back into our hands. And like you said, when we feel deeply, we're moved to action. I don't know if that's what Mr. Dent was asking for, but it feels like, yes, incredibly hopeful, incredibly inspiring. And you know, when I was, thank you for reading that. That's one of my favorite passages in the whole book. And I was hysterically crying when I wrote that. I was sobbing. I find that interconnectedness and that fact of our inseparableness and our separation incredibly painful and incredibly hopeful. I think we have time for maybe one or two more questions. Yeah, sure. Looks like they all came rolling in. Cynthia and Nick were wondering what you discovered about why you love Peter and the Wolf. Cynthia and Nick. Hi, Cynthia and Nick. Well, I discovered that I, so if you, you know, there are many versions of Peter and the Wolf. The one I listened to was the Disney version where, you know, it seems that the duck has been eaten by the wolf earlier in the story, but at the end it turns out that she's just been hiding in a tree stump. And she's okay. But in the original version of Peter and the Wolf, the duck is not okay. The duck has been eaten by the wolf and the duck is inside the wolf's belly. And the end of it, the end of this very sweet children's story is like, and if you listen closely, you can still hear her quacking inside the wolf. And I discovered that I was actually listening for the duck. I was listening from the point of view of the duck. It was sort of this very queer listening, this adjacent listening, this trying to find my story in the story, trying to figure out what it meant to be consumed, to be silenced, to be made, to be cut out of part of the story. In the version I had, the duck was the only female, and the only animal that was gendered female. And once I, once I understood that, I was able to get to some of, some of why I listened to it so often, even though it was so scary. One more? Sure. And then we'll wrap up with another quote. How would you describe the main hope for, hope you hold for your book to your nine-year-old self? The main hope I hold for my book to my nine-year-old self. I certainly, you know, what I've learned from writing the book that I would love to, if I could hold my nine-year-old self on my lap, that I would love to say to her is, it's okay. It's okay to feel all those bad feelings. It's not going to make you bad. It's okay to feel all those sad feelings. It's not going to make you, it's not going to stick you in a state of permanent sadness. And it's okay to experiment with the parts of yourself that, that feel maybe bad or dark or sad and see what happens when you make art about them or sit with them a little bit. I think that that was the, as a, as a kid, I learned how to make art as a, as a curative, as a, as a, as a, as a buoy, as a, as a spark. Right. In service of something else. Yeah. Yeah. And, and it took me a long time to understand that it could be in service of me too. I'm so glad to have had a chance to hear you read from the book, Megan, and to talk a little bit. There's so many things we didn't get to. Maybe we can have another conversation or you can read it in like serial style, right? So each, each, each, you know, Monday night, we'll have another installation. Well, apparently I'm doing a book club now. Yes, I think so. So before we break, I was hoping you would read a passage that I'm very fond of and that can take us out. But let me just, before you read, I want to say thank you so much to HowlRound and live TV and to Thea Rogers for running the live stream and coordinating all the tech, BJ, all you guys are amazing. Maddie Siegel, our screener, and to Mark and the publisher of third thing, the third thing, press to Canada. Oh, sorry, I'm sorry, I mean to cut you off. You finish and then I'll talk. No, just thank you and thank you everyone for tuning in. Don't, don't, don't disappear yet. We got one last beautiful, beautiful reading for you. Yeah. And I was going to say before I read that passage, thank you also to the Brookline Booksmith where this would have been happening if it were live and you can support a local small business by buying the book from the Booksmith. They have free media mail shipping right now to anywhere, wherever you are in the country. And they, well, as of yesterday, they had curbside pickup, but I feel like that maybe is over now. Yeah. So media mail shipping. And if for any reason you have trouble finding them, you can also get it from the third thing press. Please support local bookstores. Yes. Yeah, support local bookstores. All right. So the piece I'd love to hear you read is from your, the last essay, Connect. Yes. Contact. Oh, contact, contact. It remind me of the page number that you I think it was one, one, two, 10, two, 10. Okay. Oh yeah. Yeah. Okay. Yeah. Each act of writing or reading of making or viewing of acting or directing is an act of reaching out to another point in the void, a point from which someone is reaching out to you. The mutual reaching represents an extraordinary collusion across time and space, a combined act of radical faith. In the availability of one human experience to another human experience, in the twin desires to know and be known, I find the new kind of hope somehow both risk and blessing. Maybe then the happy ending is not what creates hope or defines hopeful art. It is in each moment of potential encounter along the path. And how available we are willing to be again and again to the idea that something might be generated there. Thank you, Melinda. Thank you, Megan. This is a beautiful book. There must be happy endings on a theater of optimism and honesty by my friend, Megan Sandberg-Zakian. I love you, Megan. I love you, Melinda.