 are morphing into the holiday season in New York City with all the uncertainties and new viruses coming our way. And we are continuing on our journey to talk to writers, most of them artists, theater artists who took the time of Corona to finish a book, publish a book and bring a book out. Everything was closed, there were no book talks possible. Time and we spoke with Emily Mann and Alexis Greene. It was the first time they talked about the book after five, six, seven years of work. And today we have with us the wonderful Carrie Perlov. Carrie, how are you, wonderful? Are you in a theater? Are you in a backstage? Is it a Kitchcock movie? The fantasy of being in the theater. I'm sitting in San Francisco in front of them. I put on my screen a photograph of my production of The Homecoming with lighting by Alex Nichols and set designed by Daniel Osling. Cause I thought it would be super, supremely creepy as an image to talk about. Pinter, so that's great. I wish I was in theater. Yeah, it looks very beautiful. And I just wish I would have been in that room and I was in The Homecoming. That is wonderful. So Carrie wrote a book and finished a book. And the title of the book is Pinter and Stoppard, Director's View. And why is this book special? Why is it different than others? It's a theater director, a highly recognized theater director. We will come to your bio a bit later who actually talks from the garden, from the front, from the travel thing she did. So it's not what often we do. And for good reasons that coming out of a university, academic theoretical reflections which we feel are very significant and very important. But as much as often practitioners discredit the work of academics, academics or university do not pay enough attention to what artists have to say and what they are saying. And sometimes I just read that quote, quote you have to listen to hear. I think the great owner of CBGB said that. That's what his mom said. That's why he let the punk bands in. So we're gonna listen and hear now from Kerry about two of the great writers of the 20th century and still going on with Tom Sobot. So Kerry, you are director, why do you write the book? I don't understand why, what's going on? Well, as I said, I picked this little section to read in the beginning which I can read for you if you want because I started at the day of the lockdown. I thought I'm a theater artist and now there's no theater. There's nothing live anywhere. And maybe there won't be for a long time to come. And what am I gonna do? I get bored very easily. And I have boxes of my big, prompt scripts that I worked off of every production I've done for the last 35 years. And half of them were pinter and stopper and I had letters for them and faxes from them and correspondence with them. And I'd always wanted to do something with it. For this reason, I feel like being in the room with those writers opened my eyes to the sort of what I call the rules of play. There are ways to crack those plays that are fun and fertile and alive. And there are questions to ask that are not useful that I learned over the course of many years. Like don't go down that blind alley because it's not gonna get you anywhere with these plays. It might get you, you know, psychological stuff might get you somewhere with Tennessee Williams, it's not gonna get you anywhere with pinter. So I thought, what if I tried to write a book about what I learned from being in the room with those two men. And I wrestled a lot with lots of questions like do they belong in a book together? They're completely aesthetically different writers. So first I had to make the case for that, like why should these two writers be in the same book? And then, and you know these days when you write a book you have to write a book proposal to get it published and you have to fill in every detail like what will the reader be able to do after he or she has read the book? Like you could build a bookshelf. And I thought, well, maybe the reader will have access to some of the greatest theatrical writing ever and not feel intimidated by it. So that was kind of the goal. Fantastic. And I think it's a great book. It's an intense detail engagement over decades with playwrights and also a model in a way, you know, to give playwrights a home in a theater with the director as a sounding board also. And I was inspired that you said, pandemic started, I took out pinter and I saw the reader, but maybe share a little bit of your opening of your book. At the very beginning, people are probably so bored of thinking, what did you do during the pandemic? But this is really true. So the beginning of the book is called introduction, the case for a shared view of pinter's and stopper's work. On the morning of March 16th, 2020, as the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic were beginning to be felt across the world, we were ordered to shelter in place in San Francisco. And uncanny feeling of dread had already begun to spread throughout the city. Looking out my window, everything appeared normal. The skies were blue, cyclists were hurtling through Golden Gate Park en route to the ocean, newspapers were being delivered, but the air was infected. Danger seemed to be lurking everywhere, even if we could not see it or put our finger on it. A kind of heightened silence and inchoate dread, a palpable menace pervaded the collective psyche. I began thinking about Harold Pinter. When Harold Hobson reviewed the first production of Pinter's The Birthday Party in 1956, he said, quote, Mr. Pinter's threat is of a subtler sort. It breathes in the air, it cannot be seen, but it enters the room every time the door is open. There's something in your past, it doesn't matter what, which will catch up with you. There is terror everywhere. On that first night at the virus lockdown, I pulled my collective place of Harold Pinter off the shelf as I have done during many moments of disruption or change in my life, and spent the evening rereading the homecoming aloud with my husband. The queasy terror of the place first lines, Max says, what have you done with the scissors? Really launches this violent and erotic tale of a seemingly ordinary East End Jewish family after the war. Two grown boys live with their dad, whose brother drives upscale clients around London in his fancy car, and on the night the play occurs, the educated son who has gone off to America comes home for a visit with his wife Ruth. The anxiety of the visitors as they walk into that dark and fraught house, that's what you see on the screen, is excruciating. What we witness in the course of the play is an entire kingdom collapsing. The world of Max patriarchal, aggressive, weak, toxic, Jewish and territorial succumbs to the world of Ruth, seductive, sexual, secretive, mysterious, and answering to no one but herself. As that collapse gets underway, the slightest move incites terror. Pinter knew about the effects of war. He grew up during the Blitz in London. He encountered both extreme violence and pervasive antisemitism. He understood what it felt like to sit inside a perfectly ordinary room and jump with fear at a knock on the door. He also intuited that terror has an erotic component and that indeed all human relations are on some level sexual. In Pinter's dramaturgy, power and dominance are the goals by which life is lived. You are either predator or prey. Action reveals character, truth is fungible. Perhaps this is why Pinter's plays do not date. They are metaphoric enough to be eternal and visceral or local enough to be immediate and recognizable, besides they're hilarious. For all those reasons and more, his plays felt like perfect companions in a pandemic. So that's the beginning. Yeah, wonderful. Yeah, yeah, because it's quite a statement. So all the boxes you had, all the notes you took, we're waiting for you for years, a little bit lonely in there. And then they called you and you went there. For all of you listeners, and we have many international listeners who do not know about Ikari, she is a director, writer, producer, and an educator and who just completed 25 years of her directorship at the Artistic Director, as the Artistic Director of the American Conservatory Theater in San Francisco. A very, very significant theater in the American landscape is one of the league of residence theaters. She was actually the youngest woman to take over the helm. We just had Emily Mann with us who also took over the MacArthur. She was there for 30 years. And in both cases, actually, and I think, Kari, you put your finger on that. Female young directors were called in when there were four or five million dApps. Nobody wanted to take the job. And the buildings have collapsed, yeah. The buildings collapsed here. The phenomenon you wrote when women are empowered, when they are most likely to fail, having inherited a mess made by men. And complication in our last Tegel talk, you talked a bit how complicated it was to direct as a woman and Emily Mann, really. And also, I would have found some of trucking details, wrote about it, and Alexis wrote about it in the book. So, ACD is a great theater. And before she ran the CSC, the classic stage company here in New York and where she staged world premieres of Ezra Pounds, Electra, and London Opie for excellence. And of course, she is well known, internationally known for collaboration with Stopport and Pinter, gave her home to this great country. And also in Paris, she also wrote beautiful chaos, a life in this theater. It's a nice thing, beautiful chaos, I like that. And she was awarded the Chevalier de l'Ordre des Arts et d'Electra by the French government, something we all want and we don't get. And she has several honorary degrees. She studied classics and comparative literature at Stanford, was a full bride at Oxford University and she continues to direct around the world at the gates here, the great gate theater in Dublin and the Stopport Shakespeare Festival. So, it's a big honor to have you with us. And we also have a little connection, of course, of the strong one that they whispered, or we held the official celebration when he died of his life, Matthew Burton, who I'm friends with, Harry, who was his adopted son in a way, who David Goddard made a contact to us and Henry Wolf actually came. We had great readings, discussions, filmmakers, as great, great artists who participate, I wish I had known you then and you have been for sure part of it. Listen, you directed, I think, Stopport seven times, Pinter, 10, 11 times, the birthday party, you directed three times in your life. What is it about those two writers? Wow, well, I came to Pinter before I came to Stopport. So, my theater training is very sketchy, as I told you last time, I really wanted to be an archeologist when I went to college, but I took Martin Esslin's class on Theater of the Absurd when I was at Stanford and started reading Pinter, and I just never looked back. So, it's always hard for me to tell exactly how do I define it? To me, it's the kind of quintessential and most brilliant fusion of poetic and realistic drama. In other words, it's not abstract, although people think it's abstract and he didn't like the term Theater of the Absurd. To him, it wasn't absurd at all. It was absolutely meticulously observed reality. However, because his method of observation, he was a poet really at heart, the way he could take language, ordinary language that he had heard and distill it to its essential spoken poetry was unparalleled, nobody could do that. I also think, and this is the chapter I shared with you all, I think intuitively, when I first read Pinter, I partly felt drawn to it because he was a Central European Jew, really, and that's my family background, my mother's a Viennese refugee, and there was something about the world of it that I understood. He is a kind of classic modernist, as a kid in the Blitz in London, he was reading Kafka and he's the first person really to discover Beckett. He took Beckett's novels out of the library and hacked me and never gave them back. He still has the same copy that he had. He understood Beckett's prose in a way that people didn't seem to at the time. So he felt immediate to me and familiar. And the other thing is he's catnip for a director because he leaves, it's so specific, but it's also so spare. And it means every move count. I love minimalism, but it's not cluttered up, it's not literal, so it's like choreography. And I think because I love dance so much and I've done a lot of dance in my life, that also felt familiar to me and sort of delicious. And so, you know, I fell in love with Pinter very, very young in my early 20s. Stoppard came to me later, oddly. I hadn't worked on Stoppard in New York. I mean, I'd followed the plays, I'd seen the plays. And yet when I came to ACT, one of the first things I wanted to do was Arcadia. ACT already had a great history with Tom, so I didn't invent that. He already knew ACT and they wouldn't give me the rights to Arcadia because it was being done at Lincoln Center, which always enraged me, you know, that New York theaters could hold up the rights for the rest of the country. I thought was deeply unfair. And so I wrote him a letter and I can't remember how it got to him. Somebody I knew knew him. It might've been through Pinter's agent. Anyway, he wrote me back immediately, this wonderful letter. We started this incredible epistolary correspondence and I love letter writing and he liked letter writing. So we sort of bonded. And then my husband is English. And so when we were in England, we met Tom and I at the National Theater. And again, all I could say is he walked in that building. I looked at him and I thought, oh, I know you. Like he just felt like tin. And I don't feel this way with most English playwrights. So that's what made me think it was partly their Central European Jewish background. You know, I've never wanted to work on David Hare or that group of kind of the wasp British playwrights never spoke to me or Osborn or whatever. So those are the two playwrights that from that moment on became the sort of loadstarts of my theatrical practice and spent time in the rehearsal room with me. Which was incredible. Tell us a bit, how did it feel to be in the rehearsal room with the writers? Something often directors try to avoid. You know, there are some playwrights that are a nightmare in rehearsal because they want to control, you know, if in the script it says, you know, he stands here then it has to happen the way they wanted. It's also very hard for some playwrights to understand that the rehearsal process is iterative, right? It's like a scientific experiment. Every day is different. Anne Boga writes so beautifully about this in her book. You know, every day is an event. It's not going to lead to the conclusion of the play early on. So you need a playwright sitting there who understands the process, who isn't going to panic when the actor doesn't get it instantly. And what was so spectacular about having Pinter and Stopper in the room is that they are consummate men of the theater. Do you know what I mean? They didn't look upon their text, which is amazing because they were such meticulous writers as final products to be achieved. They completely understood, you know, the process. So I worked with Pinter in the room when I was very young. It came about in a very strange way which I'll tell you, Frank, I had done, I really wanted to do the birthday party at CSC. And I fought and fought and fought to get the rights. And Judy Deish, his agent, didn't want to give us the rights. It hadn't been revived since its first production. And she apparently felt that American productions were too psychological and boring and that they wouldn't be funny. And I kept saying to her, no, I'm married to a Brit and I get the irony and I understand the humor and I'll cast it well. And anyway, that took forever and we finally did this production. And he sent his friend, Betty Bacall, to see it. And she loved it and she said to Harold, oh, it's great, you should come see it. So when I was in London, I had lunch with him, which was the beginning of many, many lunches that I had with Pinter in London, because he loved lunch. And lunch was a long affair and it had a lot of white wine and many, many things got talked about. And in that lunch, he said to me, I've written this new play, it's called Mountain Language. It's only 20 minutes. What would you think about doing it on a double bill with the birthday party? Which is kind of fascinating because it turned out that the past requirements were the same. Now, the birthday party doesn't need a curtain raiser, but I thought, how fascinating because they're both in a way plays about terror and violence and predatory behavior, but in a very different key. So we did that. And he said, if you do that, I'll come and work with you. So he came to New York and we spent a great deal of time in the room together, like three weeks. And mostly we worked on the birthday party, not Mountain Language, which was amazing because the birthday party was 30 years old by then. It's not like he hadn't done it a million times. And here's what was so incredible. He loved every moment of solving the problem at hand. He talks about theatrical facts. What are the facts? How do you solve the facts? He was never interested in abstract questions about feelings or, you know, he always had that brilliant notion that you couldn't verify the past and that a character does not arrive on stage with an identity card any more than a human being arrives in life with an identity card. And so part of a play is trying to discover who is somebody. But he loved, I write a whole chapter in my book about props because a pinter play is like a magic trick. You call them epiphenic props. Yes. Which is interesting. I had to look it up to make sure. The magical power of props, like a Joseph Cornell box, seeming the ordinary objects that contain some kind of luminosity by virtue of their precise arrangement and placement. So tell us a bit about that. Well, you know, he was an actor, right? Pinter was an actor for many, many years. And one of the actors he most admired was Donald Wolfit who played a memorable leader and other things. And he had this whip, for instance, that he used when he did Oedipus at Colonus that Pinter thought was fascinating. So I mean, he'd been in a lot of Agatha Christie. So he completely understood that a very seemingly ordinary prop can be the source of terror if you detonate it right. And the reason I called them epiphanic props, like Joyce's epiphany, is let us say in the birthday party, Stanley, that poor ex-artist, concert pianist who's hiding out upstairs in the bedside, he wears these spectacles. And when he's being tortured in the game in act two, McCann, the Irish thug, takes the spectacles and snaps them. And I'm looking at your spectacle and thinking, if you did that right now, they wouldn't break. They don't actually do that. But it is an incredible image of the destruction of somebody's mind. And you know, as Beckett said about Joyce, it is not about the thing, it is the thing itself. The actions in Pinter are not about it. It is the action of breaking somebody's psyche. So it has to snap, but the problem is glasses don't really do that. So we had to figure out, how do we make that moment work? And it was hard to do. And one day, David Strutharen, who was playing Stanley, came in early. He sawed the bridge of the glasses in half. He drilled a hole in both sides. He stuck a toothpick in, glued the whole thing back together, didn't tell us what he'd done. And in the middle of rehearsal, when Richard Reilly, who was playing McCann, grabbed the glasses and snapped them, you heard that toothpick snap. And we all sort of jumped out of our seats and thought, that's it. And every moment in Pinter is like that when McCann tears the newspapers into strips. It's like flaying somebody. You know, he had an uncanny ability to find the exact action that would resonate and tell you the internal violence that was being done. But it's a very ordinary gesture. It's a guy shredding a newspaper. So what Pinter loved was pursuing those theatrical facts, those details, those absolutely precise moments of choreography or encounter or conflict. He looked at his characters as real people. So if you asked him a question, he'd stop and think as if someone else had written the play. And then he'd give an answer. Like we said, why does Meg spend the whole beginning of the play asking Petey to read her the newspaper? You know, what does that tell you about their marriage? And I was thinking, you know, is she lonely? Are they alienated? Is this a woman who'd lost a child in the war? I had a lot of psychological things in my mind. And he paused for a long time. And then he said, I believe she has forgotten how to read. And that's such a great thing to play. Like that's the thing an actor can play. So I also think this note's fantastic. Let's talk a bit about your rehearsal process, your desire and your strong welcoming of having the playwright in the room, your letters, facts that I read about going back and forth. Why do you feel it's more significant to get the intention of the writer than your interpretation or what's in your mind, your imagination? It's such a great question. And you know, it is a nose. Look, first of all, it's not usually possible. You know, either the writer is dead or he or she or they or whatever. It's not somebody you have access to. And sometimes it isn't that helpful. As I say, with these two writers, I found it immensely helpful because they're such men of the theater, they understood that when you asked a question, it was about problem solving, more than it was about interpretation, right? Like, Pinter never told us how to interpret the birthday party or the homecoming. Or he never said the homecoming is an existential play about the collapse of patriarchy, but you could interpret it that way. Or it's a parallel with the golden bow. I mean, there's so many things you could, it's been interpreted a million different ways that play. You know, the old times, is old times actually a lesbian play? He never wanted to talk on that level. He was interested in the theatricality of it, the moment to moment problem solving of what happened in the room. That's when it's useful to have the playwright. With Stockford, Stockford is not an actor and not primarily a director. So his answers to things were often more complicated, a little more intellectual, but also incredibly helpful. Where I found Stockford so brilliant and invaluable in the room was he has an ineffable sense of language. And he would have a little, he has a little notebook that he would use in the room and he would write next to a certain word, LA. And that meant look after. And so he knew that his plays would only work if certain words were lifted, so that at another point in the play, they're both sportsmen, by the way, they played cricket together with Stockford. That was my justification for putting in them in the same book, is that they played cricket together. But he knew someone had to throw the ball up in such a way that two acts later, the other person could bat it. And so he would help us understand, for example, what to lift so that the audience knew to lean forward. And it's often not the words you think, it's often the little words like if, so that it would come back later on. He also was brilliant. This is true of both Pinter and Stockford in saying, action on stage is present tense. You don't have to do what you are taught to do in the American theater, which is build an arc of experience, which seeds certain things in act one that are gonna lead to the catharsis in the end of the play. Neither of them were interested in that, right? They thought Pinter said, everybody always forgets, the past is undarifiable, so every scene should start clean. With Stockford, Stockford's feeling is, life is full of unbelievable reversals and surprises. And if you look at his biography, which we should talk about for a minute when we talk about the Jewish thing, because life has been full of unbelievable reversals. So for example, when we did Indian Ink and he sat in the room with us the whole time and we did that play three times. We did the American premiere in San Francisco, then many 20 years later, we did it in New York at the roundabout, then we brought it back to San Francisco. The actors playing Flora Crew, the poet and Nira Das, the painter, wanted to set up in the first act that they were gonna have a love affair. He said, no, no, the whole pleasure of the play is it's a play about romance and you get it wrong. You think her romance is with the Raja or you think her romance is gonna be with Durance, the military guy and then suddenly at the end of the play, the conditions pertain to love and maybe, but we don't know, it's not verified, those two people have an affair. And he said, if you set it up, the surprise is gone, play the reversal. So I always found him incredibly just alive and useful and wonderful in the room, wonderful the actors, very generous. Well, why I like your book and why I think it's very important for anybody to, of course they have to find their own way to do playwrights, any playwright, but you wrote about it, you said, I believe the mysteries of the place can best be understood inside the production process. Actually not saying, let me read 10 books. Right. And let me read all these interviews. He did. And then I know what it is about. You say, no, a mystery, the mystery, what's covered or hidden, you know, as someone said, the apocalypse actually means the Greek word doesn't mean just the world was and what it means is something that has been hidden reveals a divine truth, reveals itself so the shell is being taken away as in a way it's in Corona time, so that's true. And in a way, I think you give us an eye into a rehearsal process and into directing process that I think is such an important lesson for everyone in the theater. And it's also so joyful for everyone who loves theater to know how did it this, how did it work? And so you came before we maybe also then go a bit more to stop it. Emily Mann talked about when she was a kid, she had like Emily Ville, she had like little dolls and house and she wrote rules, what was allowed and whatnot. So now we also have the Pearl of Rules, which she calls the Pinter Rules, but actually they are her rules and something you discovered. And I think everybody has, of course, to discover everybody, but in your particular way, I would like to talk to you a little about it in that freedom you have to discover things. You also said there are some things and that might help. So first what you talked about, the vision of the human situation, the first rule I discovered in staging his work was that while everything on stage has to be real, everything that is real does not have to be on stage. What do you mean? You know, we tend to wanna do like, if you look at this set that Daniel Osling did of the Homecoming, right? Pinter describes the set and one of the things he says, which is so unexplained and creepy and fascinating, is that it's a room that it's much bigger than it should be because the central wall has been knocked out. And Lenny, the pimp, describes this to Ruth, the wife when she comes home with Teddy and he says, as if these two things were connected, we knocked out the wall, my mother had died. And it was like when Jesse, when the only female presence in the house was gone, the patriarchy just smashed that wall and made this kind of enormous abattoir. So the set, as you can see, it has these kind of Richard Sarah, like a big canted walls. I thought he's a butcher, Max, but he's clean. Everything that's described is that everything is scrubbed and cleaned like the counter of an abattoir. Now, in order to make that work, you can't gussy it up with stuff. You can't put family photos on the wall and lots of molding and chachkas and extra rugs and all the things that you would decorate a regular house with because then you don't see the key things that Pinter needs you to see in the Homecoming, a huge amount of the orchestration of terror, and it is a play about terror, is in the lighting. And he gives you that. Pinter will say, you see, if I lean over, you see that some, oh, where's my finger? That's Lenny standing at the bottom of the stairs, looking at Teddy go up. So in the moment it happens, he forces Teddy up the stairs by flicking a light switch and you just see the light at the top of the stairs. Now, that light is the searchlight coming from the realm of evil because always in Pinter, what happens upstairs is sexually deviant and terrified. And the golden rule is like, you don't wanna get hurt, don't go upstairs. And so the light is very controlled. The light that's down there by that throne, that's Max's throne and in the end of the play, Ruth is sitting on the throne with that light next to it. That's also the light where the glass of water is gonna be where she kind of emasculates Teddy. So these things are like altars. That's why I said it's like a Joseph Cornell box. They're like sacred items and they have to shine. They have to pop like the cornflakes box in the birthday party. So if you want the cornflakes box to really loom large, then it has to be alone in the space. That's all I can say. They should almost look like alien objects, right? Well, yes. And the first woman who wrote about the tour of the birthday party when they did it in, I don't know, 68 or something, she said they had to carry that box of cornflakes with them when they went on tour because people in other countries didn't know what it was. You know, breakfast cereal, American breakfast cereal is quite new to Britain. And now we still, that cornflakes box in the play is the essence of Meg's coping mechanism. It's like what's inside her brain. As long as she can pour those cornflakes, put the milk in, hand them to her husband, Petey and say, were they nice? He says, yes, I thought they'd be nice. Then she's okay. And when Stanley's been destroyed, she wakes up the next day and the cornflakes box is empty. And that's how you know, Stanley's dead. So, you know, Pinter pays very close attention to those kinds of details. Stopper also loves theatrical tricks. And his plays are really hard to design, really hard because magic happens. And you have to sort of figure out how do you do it live on stage? How does the train arrive? In Indian ink, while at the same time, an old woman in England is opening a letter and reading about the train arriving. So with Tom, his plays are about time travel. They usually take place in multiple places at the same time and at multiple time frames, unlike Pinter, which is absolutely unity of time and place always. So designing a stopper play is an incredible puzzle. And he loves that process and loves you to reinvent something or think of an idea that he never had. That's partly what I loved about having Stopper did rehearsal is how much he loved designers, how respectful he was of the other artists always. Tell us a bit about the staircase. It's eerie, you're also right about it. What's the significance? So in the birthday party, there is an implied offstage staircase where Stanley lives upstairs. So it's the place of safety, but it ultimately is the place where Stanley lures Lulu up the stairs and does something terrible to her in the night. The interesting thing for me is in the birthday party, you don't see the staircase, but we did it at CSC in New York, which is a thrust. So you have to see the staircase because the only way for the actors to get off stage was to go up the stairs. And Pinter was very intrigued by that because it's not how he imagined the birthday party. He always wrote his plays for proscenium stages, right? Because he was kind of a traditional play right that way. That's how he'd been trained. Both of them are, right? Proscenium writers, interesting. That's exactly... That kind of a traditional machine of theater and they felt at home and criticized it the same way. That's exactly right. So even though they were very radical playwrights, they wrote within that proscenium as Beckett did. And so when he got to CSC, he kept staring at that staircase, thinking, how odd and interesting that you see the actors on the staircase. And one day he said to Peter Rieger, who was playing Goldberg, in his very baritone voice, Pinter said, Peter, I wonder if you add a little line for me and Peter's like quivering in anticipation. And Pinter says, would you stop on the stairs with the Jean Stapleton who was playing Meg behind you? Turn around, survey the room and say, what a lovely flight of stairs. So he was interested in that. Now, by the time you get to the homecoming, he has internalized that evil staircase. We expanded it by making it, I think we had 25 steps. So look, if I move over. Yeah, yeah. I mean, it's unbelievable that staircase. Like a Hitchcock staircase, yeah. It is the Hitchcock staircase. Now, one of the challenges for me of doing Pinter at the Geary, which is the theater I ran at ACT, is it was a thousand seats. It's a big proscenium. Pinter plays tend to be very compressed and quite intimate. So you have to figure out a way to hold on to the tension of a Pinter play, the compression, the detail, the specificity within that big space. And so doing those canted walls and that really extensive terrifying staircase helped us do that in a way that really contained the frame at the Geary. With Stoppard, the Geary was the perfect size because he wrote always for big, usually for the National Theater. I mean, big subsidized houses and with great resources. And usually Stoppard plays are big casts. And so it's wonderful to have all that space, whether it's the invention of love, and you watch them row a boat across the River Styx or whatever, having that kind of space to design. That's why Stoppard, I think, loved coming to ACT so much as it was sort of the perfect space and the perfect audience for his work over many, many years. That audience really got to know, again, the rules of play. How does the Stoppard play actually work? Yeah, it's amazing. And I also remember the great production at Lincoln Center, The Coast of Utopia, you know that you could, you had to, it needs a big stage and they also found such beautiful solutions. What I like about the book and about your work also is in a way it's a search for truth. You want to know what does, what did he mean? What was in his mind? What is it about? You know, as you say, the thing is this thing, which is a big thing because often say the hand that points to the moon is actually not the moon, right? It's just the hand that points to it. And we forget that sometimes, even in academia often because we point to things or others. And I think this is quite remarkable and also as a lesson for anyone in theater that the mystery is in the staircase. It's in a box of cereal. It's in the sound of glasses breaking but it's actually not a class. It's a toothpick. And as you said, you put it back at, you know, who was obsessed. How do the shoes all sound? You know, they send it. How does, what is the sound? Do the lighting? You know, that this is also a team effort. That theater, you know, is a writer and a director but it's so much that goes in. That is what also makes great, great theater but both of them are fantastic writers on the golden age in a way also of playwriting. And, but you respected that and the idea is to make it shine and not to stay in front of the words. Your second Pinter rule or the Perlov rule, the PP rule, maybe Pinter Perlov rule. And you said, this brings me to a second epiphany I had working with Pinter on the rehearsal. The language of his play is revealed best if characters do not walk and talk. The same time. Yeah. What about that? Because language in Pinter is a weapon. You know, one of the things for Americans that's a mysterious often, this is a cliche but I think it's true about the British is that we Americans tend to use the English language in a quite a transparent way. We are a confessional culture. We believe in therapy. We believe in speaking and you'll be absolved. The British use language as a smoke screen. They are a deflective culture. They are not as interested in confession. And for Pinter language is always, it does many different things, but it doesn't reveal. It can tease, it can be ironic, it can hide, it can attack, but it is a tool. It is an active tool. I think, and I'm gonna segue here just because I think it's connected. This goes to Pinter's background as a Jewish boy in the Blitz. He lived through the worst of the war. He was sent away to the countryside, which is very funny to me because he hated nature. Pinter, you never see nature in his place even out the window except in No Man's Land where there's a dead body floating in the lake. So nature is not beautiful and appealing to him. He was urban. He comes back. He refuses to stay outside London during the Blitz and he comes back and lives through the worst of the bombing. And then he lives through the worst of anti-Semitism after the war, incredible violence. So he has these amazing- And he's a fascism, presence of fascism actually. Oh, presence of fascism. And the knock on the door to him was clearly the Gestapo. It's not abstract. He knew what that was. So he has an amazing description, for instance, of getting caught in an alleyway and having to talk his way out by saying, are you all right? Everybody all right? We're gonna be all right. We're gonna walk through. So language is a kind of Morse code. And all I meant about not walking and talking at the same time is it's not a casual thing where an actor kind of does what Stanislawski would call a secondary action where you are chatting about something. And while you're doing that, you walk over and look at the window. Because it's so spare. If you look at this set, let's say you're sitting on that throne, that's Max's chair. If you have two people sitting across from each other in Pinter and one person stands up, the whole ozone of the room changes. That's a power grab. So you want that action to read in the biggest way possible. So it can't be casual. It can't be sloppy. It can't be half done. It has to be well-lit. And it doesn't help that it's done at the same time as somebody's talking. So I asked Judy Ivy when we did the birthday party in that opening sequence, which is a kind of lotsy, a kind of comic routine where she comes and makes breakfast for Petey. That she do the action, present the corn flakes, watch them eat it, walk out, stand there while he's eating it, whatever, before she talks. So that each thing has its own weight. So language has the same weight as movement. And that also goes to the long and tortured history of the Pinter pause and the Pinter silence. Sometimes the silence is where somebody moves slowly or travels across the room, like in Robert Wilson. And sometimes the silence is in stillness, but it doesn't help to muddy language and movement. So that was a rule that I love to play with and it usually worked. Yeah, and I like you, I think you quote Wittgenstein who said, sometimes you have to take an expression out of a language, send it for a cleaning and you put it back into circulation, but it had to be heard, right? It had to be understood. It had to be clear. Yes. Now, to me, that's one of Stoppard's geniuses. Stoppard has an incredible nose for cliche and can't and sort of even like banal political speech. And it's so beautiful in his play rock and roll when Jan the Czech guy says to the British you don't even understand that you have the confidence of your own language because you have hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of years of parliamentary democracy in a free press. We don't have that. So our language is perverted. When the Czech communist government says freedom what they really mean is locking people up. And when they said, do you know what I mean? I mean, he had an acute sense of that. And again, and I'll say this about Stoppard's biography which is only now coming to light. Hermione Lee wrote this amazing recently biography 900 pages about Stoppard. To read about Stoppard's childhood Frank is unbelievable. Here is a child at age two in Zlin Czechoslovakia who gets taken away from everything he knew by his parents with his brother and they go to Singapore because there's a shoe factory there of the same factory as father was the surgeon at the Jewish surgeon in Czechoslovakia. His father then volunteers is on a gunboat gets blown up by the Japanese, but he doesn't know that. He and his mother and his brother on a ship going to Australia that gets rerouted to India. He spends the war in India. He learns to speak English at an American Methodist school in Darjeeling. And it's only two years into the war that somebody comes a friend and tells them that his father's dead. Now imagine, so this thing about dislocation and about not knowing what's gonna happen not writing a play where the characters know about their past or know what the future's gonna bring is completely tied to his biography. So although I know one has to be careful about making those connections, I do think reading every letter and everything you can get your hands on about a playwright's background is immeasurably useful reading all their other plays. And in the case of Pinterest Stoppard knowing the details of that Jewish background and the war trauma is immensely useful. You then get to his first play, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern and Guildenstern says this thing to the player king. He says, no, no, no, I'm paraphrasing, but you can't stab and roll around on the ground and death is not blood and destruction and murder and everything. Death is a character walking off stage and never coming back. Now you see him, now you don't. Which was his father. And to me, all of Stoppard's work is about that sense of loss. Trying to make sense of who he is, the plays all have these dual personalities divide itself, which he absolutely was. Thomas Strossler the Jew from Czechoslovakia, Tom Stoppard, the perfect British playwright that divide itself and the loss of culture. Which you hear in Arcadia, you hear an invention of love over and over again like the burning of the books, the sense that a culture's been lost, that people have been murdered, that you have to hold on to art because art is the only thing that's gonna keep civilization alive, which goes back to your thing about language. And I think it's why they were both so cynical about didactic plays and political speech being something that ultimately has to be punctured because it's so cliched. Not a popular stance right now, but I think ultimately an important one. Yeah, but I think also your book is a reminder of the importance and significance of writing for the theater of plays and words, which of course, in some way, it is the dominant structure in the commercial American theaters or nothing new in that sense, but still in that kind of contemporary theater and also wrestling with themes we are working now, often perhaps it's more time spent on lighting movement, perhaps things written fast and words perhaps have a little bit casual, the use of it. And that's right. Plays might be better, you know, and this is what we opt to, as you would say magicians of writing, imagining, and still saying the word itself is not it, but you discover it actually in the rehearsal process and then when it really exists. And the big question as a Mozart sonata exists, if it's written down in a library at the Morgan library or it doesn't exist when you hear it. Yeah, and Tom, you know, Stopper has always said he thinks plays are a blueprint for production. So one of the things that's very, very different about Pinter and Stopper it is, except for that one line, I never saw Pinter change even a pause in his plays, but Stopper with me, you know, all the years we've worked together has often rewritten. Yeah, you said there are like three versions of the birthday party, right? They all... I mean, Stopper will give you a bespoke production. Like we, he rewrote the end of Indian ink 20 years after he published it. Didn't bother him at all that the published edition then didn't match what we did. I'm sure it makes Faber tear their hair out that he constantly does this. But he thinks, what's the difference? You know, it's a living document. And so we felt that the end of Indian ink should tie up in a way the wonderful personal story of Flora and Nira Das and the sister, the sort of love stories in the play rather than end on a voiceover. And so I remember sitting in his kitchen in London before we did it the second time and he would just rework it. He made cuts, he rewrote it. It was quite remarkable, often. I mean, he was completely willing to do that and think about that. And we did it with a hard problem because I felt that no one would know that the financial crash was taking place. And he adamantly didn't want a slide that said 2008 on the screen. So we had to figure out what clue could we give the audience in San Francisco that the financial crash had happened. And he couldn't figure it out till he was sitting in rehearsal. And then suddenly he said, oh, I know exactly what it is. And he solved it. So, and he loved that, you know? And so, and yet the language is luminous like a magic trick. And I think about that great, great speech in the real thing, where Henry is being asked by his lover Annie to adapt this really terrible play by a political activist whom she's kind of working with. And he says, I can't do it. It's just bad writing. And she's so snarky about it. And she says, oh, you're so arrogant. You just think you write well because you're a writer. But why should a professional writer have any dominance over someone who has something to say? And he gives this speech, Henry, where he says, it's not because I'm a writer. It's because words are sacred. And if you structure them in the right way, you might have a chance, it's the cricket metaphor, when you bat them that they will fly. And that's what you want as a playwright. And very few people can do that. You know, write something that is so meticulously constructed and so alive that when an actor gives it a puff of air, it will fly. And I think because language is so important to me. And again, I talk about this in the Jewish chapter. It's a very Jewish thing. Amos Oz, the great Israeli writer says that, you know, for Jews, if you want to leave a monument to your children, you don't build a, you know, throughout the history, you know, in the Bible and in the diaspora, if you build a building, you may end up getting exiled. You know, if you build a house, you may end up losing it. But if you write a book, it will carry with you, right? That language is the thing that carries and also that Jewish Talmudic sense of argument, which is kind of what drives Stopford. It's so hilarious. His plays are always dialectics. And he gives the characters who he doesn't agree with the best arguments, you know, because argument matters, because dialectic matters, because language matters. And I think for me, that's why his plays are so moving. And I know people think often, they're too clever by half that they're brittle and maybe they are, but I feel that you have to play what's at stake and that language is the thing that saves the characters in the play. So they're not just trying to be clever, they're trying to survive. Language is also how you seduce someone. It's erotic. That's why Tom Stopford is the sexist man in England and everybody's always said that, you know? So language is not dry and brittle to him. It's very much a living thing. Yeah, yeah, and that is quite, quite insightful. And yeah, one wonders of how Stopford, if he looks at the movie, I think he got the Oscar right for Shakespeare and Love, he can't rewrite it, right? That's it, it's done. And in theater... But he never, you know, movies, for him movies, they're jobs. Movies are jobs he does to make money so he can make plays. I don't think he ever felt precious. He, you know, it wasn't even his screenplay. He wrote it with Mark Norman. It's a fabulous screenplay, but no, I don't think he felt precious about movies that way to do it. Something very, very, very different, specific. It's just for theater and that magic, if you say if something, you know, you does work, if it's done right, it's also healing in the world. Let's come to another Pinter, Perlov rule, a PP, which I think is also an important one. It says, here's another rule of play which provided helpful in cracking open difficulties on difficult scenes like the Lulu Goldberg encounter. Unlike with more naturalistic plays, it's not generally useful for actors in Pinter to attempt to find a single spine or try to make each scene line up for a simple axis. I mean, you touched on it before, but I really would like you to talk about this. I wasn't aware of that, that what do you mean? Well, I just pulled out in his brilliant book, this collection, Harold Pinter, various voices. He wrote this speech once and he said something that stayed with me forever. He says, apart from any other consideration, we are faced with the immense difficulty of not the impossibility of verifying the past. I don't mean merely years ago, but yesterday, this morning. What took place? What was the nature of what took place? What happened? If one can speak of the difficulty of knowing what in fact took place yesterday, one can, I think, treat the present in the same way. What is happening now? We won't know until tomorrow and six months time and we won't know then, we'll have forgotten or our imagination will have attributed quite false characteristics to today. A moment is sucked away and distorted often even at the time of its birth. So what that said to me is, every moment has to be absolutely visceral and real in its playing. Then it's over. When a character walks back on stage later, do they remember what happened? Well, each one will remember it in a totally different way, depending on how it hit them, right? On how it struck them. When Meg brings Goldberg and Petey into the house, it's a terrifying moment where these two killers come. But for Meg, it's thrilling. She finds they can make some money. They flirt with her. They're delighted, you know, when the birthday party itself happens, which is an incredible carnage and destruction, she doesn't remember the next morning that something terrible happened. She thought it was wonderful. Stanley knows he's been destroyed. So everybody's reality is different and you have to play your reality as a character, but you also have to see what's happening in the present moment. And so I found it very liberating that you're not burdened with carrying something forward all the time that weighs down the next scene, right? That in a way, each scene is like a boxing, you know, it's like the bell goes off and then the boxing match starts. And so you have to let that boxing match, that round of the boxing match start clean. You don't think, oh, I was injured before I have to come in injured. You try to come in fresh. It's why the plays are so exhausting to perform. And with Pinter and Stopper, I always found the rehearsals just drain the actors because every moment counted. You know, they were like being in a sports match. Yeah. So if I understand right, you say each scene then that starts new is completely new. There's no psychological character arc in the Stanislavskian sense. Something carries, obviously. This is a new round. It's a new round. It's a new round, completely as an actor, invent that, be part, be present. And it's an interesting, radical concept actually. I'm forward to think about it. It comes from improvisation. So Peter Rieger brilliantly did the Goldberg in my birthday party and then did many other plays for me and did celebration, which is the play I write about that we did at 9-11. When I thought that Pinter was gonna be with us for this big celebration of his work. And we were doing the room and celebration together, the American premiere of celebration and with his first play, The Room. And then came 9-11 and he couldn't, he didn't come because he was so antipathetic to American foreign policy and wrote this beautiful letter, which by the way, I wasn't allowed to publish because you can't publish Pinter's letters, which is very sad, but again, Rieger was in that. And what Rieger always said is, just remember the rules of improv. You walk on the stage, here are the rules of the game and you have to say yes. And then if an actor starts doing something different, you have to respond to it and do something different yourself and that's what keeps it so alive. So it's game playing. And of course, games are central to Pinter and Stoppard. The British love games. Pinter kept saying, play up, play up, play the game. So that's what Goldberg says. And it's true in Stoppard, that they loved puzzles and games and Stoppard would set up for himself a game in every play. So like the real thing, the game is, you see a scene between a husband and wife called House of Cards that looks like a marriage is ending. And then in the next scene, you see another scene and you realize that's the scene with the playwright who wrote the scene before and that the scene before is a play within a play. So with Stoppard, you always have to figure out before you do the plays, what's the game? How do you set up the game and how do you play the game? That's why you can't carry a lot of baggage with you because in a game, all that matters is the hand you're playing now, right? You can't play the hand you played before. You can't play the chess move you played before. You have to move now. And then let the audience, of course, the audience is so important in Pinter and Stoppard because the audience will put together all the things that have happened and they will make their own narrative. Do you see what I mean? And that's why they're such generous plays because they include the audience in the game. And when you watch a Pinter play or a Stoppard play, you are part of the solving of the puzzle. You are not passive watchers of television realism. You are absolutely theatrically in the center of the game and you watch each of these events and then you put it together. So you get to the end of a play like Indian Ink and you think, did she sleep with Nira Das? What is, which is the painting? What is that painting really about that nude? You get to put it together. The same thing with Arcadia. It's a thriller. It's totally theatrical and you get to put it together. You are not obligated to carry with you some burden of false psychology. On the other hand, I will say, and I have a whole chapter about rock and roll of this 10 page facts that Stoppard sent me and Stoppard did say I could reprint all his letters and facts and so I do print some of them. There is one in it. One facts is in it. There's a long facts because I got terribly stuck on a scene between the Marxist critic Max and his sort of protege Jan, the Czech student in rock and roll who brings him back his Stasi file after Havel has taken over in Czechoslovakia. And it's a scene where I didn't understand what was happening emotionally at all. You know, the file is delivered and Max is incredibly hostile to Jan. And I thought, why is he behaving that way? He should be grateful to get the file back so he doesn't get into trouble. And I kept asking Tom and we agonized about it and he wrote me endless things and said that Trevor Nunn had had the same problem and blah, blah, blah. In the end, after 12 pages of facts, Tom said one thing. He said, and I could tell he was frustrated because the ink was all smudged and he was crossing things out. And he said, I hate writing about analyzing Max but I loved writing him. And then he said, I don't know how to explain it other than to say, I suppose he was a broken man from childhood. And of course, right away I thought, ah, I have been trying to parse it on the wrong level. I've been trying to understand the sort of surface level of argument. And really the truth is the argument belies something completely different which is what Tom said. That I have to accept the fact that this is a broken man. His wife has just died of cancer, the wife he adored. He doesn't know how to express himself in any way. He sees this young man who's like his adoptive son he feels betrayed by him. And so he behaves irrationally. And I think irrationality is a key to Tom Staubert. People think because Tom is so brilliant and so articulate and can speak in the most complicated arcane full sentences about everything from chaos theory to artificial intelligence, to the poetry of Byron to Indian painting. That people think he's so rational but in fact, what's so moving about Tom is that underneath it lies the irrational. He's always in love and that comes through in his place. Love is always the thing in a Staubert play that will upset the apple cart and make something that looks like it's going one direction suddenly make a left turn and go in another direction. And that you have to trust that as much as you trust the surface of the language. And that was a great lesson to learn. And a gift from having the playwright not only part of the process, but so generous. That's what I felt about both of them. And I do wanna say that Frank because people think of these two writers as these great Titans. And also, Pinter has been written about as being so cantankerous and difficult and he was in many circumstances. But I do wanna say I never found that in rehearsal. I never found them to be anything other than forensically excited about the work at hand and totally respectful of the process. And the fact that I was a woman and very young was not something that they used against me in any way. In any way, and that was unusual. I worked with a lot of famous American male playwrights who treated me terribly. But that just wasn't the case. And in fact, when readers read my, for Bloomsbury read the book in Gallies, they said, well, we think she's too kind to Pinter that she's giving him a pass. And I said, look, that was my experience. I don't mean to be polyannish, but he was nothing but respectful. He never treated me with disdain because I was younger because I was a woman. It just didn't come up. We were two theatrical adventures trying to solve theatrical problems. That's what it was. And that's why it was such a pleasure to work with them. Yeah, amazing. I remember Elise Docton who I saw me work from the Royal Court, the National Playwright Program. She was many times at this seat. She said when she would bring in young unknown writers from all over the world, Pinter would come. Yes. And not just to let me support it. He was interested. What was in their mind? Always. You know, what is up. So I like that. I think this is an important point that the word play contains playing. And that you said, it's a puzzle, it's a game, it's a play, you know, be part of it. It's something fun. I think Björk did this beautiful edition of her LP, which she, the Ophelia, I think it was called on an iPad. And you could, and you could, she said, you could also play her music. She did like 11 little video kind of plays and you could compose your own. She said, this is what I like, but do your own, you know? So, and you can do it. But I give you some rules. And I think your importance of saying to react to a scene like in our life, you know, big ideas people have, you know, there's no over it, but you're in a moment. You have to react to the scene, who are the actors? And you are in the moment and you have to have to do that. I think this is really insignificant. And we won't talk too much about the pinter pause and silence we have been talked about. But another one I found interesting of your rules, you said further rules of play, masking and forgetting. Yeah. I came to find in working on pinter my years on directing Greek tragedies were useful. Greek trauma was, of course, masked. Yeah. So I learned this from Peter Hall. Peter Hall wrote what I think is sort of the definitive essay on early on. It's just called directing pinter and it was how he went about it. And I thought it was, I quoted a lot. I thought it was really revelatory. And he said, obviously early on you have to be in rehearsal open to the actors really playing what they're feeling like Teddy coming home to his father's house is terrified and angry and Ruth is lascivious and predatory, whatever. But then by about the third week of rehearsal all of that has to get masked because if you, in pinter and it's true in stop or two, if you betray too much of what you want or what you're scared of you will leave yourself open to incredible attack. One of the people who writes brilliantly about this is Austin Quigley, one of the great critics on pinter in the pinter problem he always writes about that a pinter character doesn't exist except in relation to another character. So it's always relational. So one is predator and one is prey. And if you are prey and you reveal that you are scared or you show where your weak spot is the predator will be on you in a heartbeat. So you have to mask it. So in the Lulu scene in the birthday party she's just been probably raped upstairs. Some terrible thing has happened to her. And she has to come down and give this insane speech where she says, it's full of Hallmark greeting card cliches, you used me for a night of passing fancy. You made use of your cunning when my defenses were down. And it's both hilarious and horrifying because she is trying to mask her terror in order to attack this man who's attacked her. So you have to be careful with these writers in not making them melodramatic in not tipping your hand. With Stoppard what I found, and again this is through years of knowing him 35 years or something, I've known him now. He's actually, which is funny, quite a shy man. You wouldn't think that, but he is. I mean, he's so verbally dexterous but he's quite shy emotionally. He very rarely, he once said in an interview with Hermione Lee that he is culpably self-sufficient which I thought was an amazing sort of self indictment I think because of the nature of his immigration and his very complicated life. He learned to be self-sufficient and take care of himself. So he's very self-protective. He doesn't tell you if he's sad or in despair or confused or whatever. He masks it and his characters do too. And therefore the moment where a character in a Stoppard play or Pinter drops the mask that Frank is the apocalypse. Just as you described it where something hidden is exposed like and sometimes they don't mean it at all but Goldberg who never stops talking and is full of monami and thinks he has an answer to everything. He stands up and gives his speech in the third act after he's destroyed Stanley and he's quite upset but he's masking it. He stands up and says because I believe that the world and then there's a pause. Then he says again because I believe that the world then there's a pause. Then he said to the third time because I believe that the world and then there's a silence. And in the silence everything crumbles because he has no beliefs. He doesn't know what to say I believe that the world he doesn't believe anything. And he realizes it. He realizes he's completely morally bankrupt. And that's one of those moments of silence where the whole house of cards comes down. In Stoppard, you see it at a moment where a character who has been very contained or very masked or very well behaved suddenly drops the mask and erupts like Nira Das, the painter about something that's a non sequitur or seems like a non sequitur. And you think why is this character yelling at this moment? But you realize that suddenly he can't hold on to it anymore and he's totally vulnerable and it erupts and it erupts. And Tom helped us with this a lot in rehearsal of Indian ink. It erupts because he's worked so hard not to reveal before. So you have to be very careful in Stoppard about tipping your hand too soon so that when you do finally let the mask drop it will be a moment of, you know, and ignore us as if you were saying the recognition of destruction of humanity, huge humanity. Yeah, I once saw a photo project of a photographer who would take photos, photos of tourists at a fountain. They'd maybe in Rome or whatever and they smile. And then when the photo is over, that face. Oh, that's so weird. So he wasn't interested. What happens that second after? It's stunningly revealing. And as you said, and you point out sometimes even actors performance they're back to the audience, right, you? Oh, well, Pinter loved that because he did that himself. He was an amazing actor. And he often would stand with this back to an audience which was very frightening thinking what is somebody thinking? So when they turned around, you know one of the things he talked a great deal about, Frank was what passes between people's eyes and that in a pause like in, let's say in old times if you pause where Dealey is interrogating his wife, Kate you could see what passed between the eyes because what is Dealey terrified of that his wife wasn't faithful to him? And even more than that that he doesn't even know who she is that this is this woman, Kate that he's been married to all these years and he looks at her and he says you know because she was the only my one and only she says and suddenly my one and only there's a pause and it goes back to Dealey and you can tell just what you said about the photograph his face falls because he thinks was Anna her one and only were they lovers? And so often in a pause you watch a face fall and again, it's those that kind of precision that you wanna make sure you're really watching what is happening between human beings in real time that these were two writers who were endlessly interested in the human experience where we hide, where we lie where we back off, where we spin a falsehood and then where we carry a wound and I think both these playwrights carried enormous wounds and for Stoppard this Jewish quest only came out much later in his life after his mother died when he started to really look into his Jewish past and he tells this heartbreaking story about a woman called Sarka who was in fact the daughter of someone at the Batashi factory, his father Eugene Strassler had sewed her scar when she walked through a glass door and when he met her much later in her life she put out her wrist and when he touched the scar she said it was the only thing of his father's that he'd ever touched and he suddenly felt caught by grief all the grief that he owed and in his play Leopoldstadt which is running now in London there is that scene at the end of the play where a young man who now is English but had been born Viennese in this case, Viennese Jewish he realizes that that scar is the thing he carries with him about his past and suddenly he's filled with grief so you know, masking can go on your whole life Frank Tom always talked about having lived a charmed life and indeed in many ways he has lived the most charmed life he wrote a play at 29 when they said, what is it about? He said, it's about to make me very rich it did make him very rich he's lived an incredible life but the wound of his childhood the loss of his entire extended family to Auschwitz, to the camps is something that has finally caught up to him and the mask has dropped I would say and that he is now really interested in his Jewish past and it's why he loved my mother's memoir the Vienna Paradox was had a huge influence on his life and on his writing and I think it's something he and I really share that sense of the loss of a culture and for him, the loss of his whole family and now at age 82, 83 that is actually something that he's writing about which is kind of amazing Yeah, yeah, it is I think Joseph Bois, the great artist that you're one of his artworks Embrace your wounds, embrace your scars and you have to learn to live with it I think in one of Emily Mann's play of the 200 100 year old twins the one of that, what moved her so deep he said, you have to learn to live and embrace your scars and then you'll find something but let's move on to Stoppard and also a bit you said the invention of love was your favorite or is your favorite play? It is Well, I was a classicist by training and I love nothing more than the kind of wonderful useless pursuit of philology, of finding in the broken fragments of Sappho what is that word? What did it mean? And he writes this beautiful thing that houseman, you know the poet who was the classicist and also the love poet writes about useless knowledge you know, he says useful knowledge is good too but useless knowledge is the most beautiful sort of the pursuit of knowledge for its own sake is kind of what makes us humans so, you know, it's a play about knowledge and loss and love because houseman as a young man falls madly in love with Moses Jackson who never loves him back and doesn't even get it that houseman is gay and finally they're living together in a little bed sit in London and Moses Jackson realizes it and it's the most painful scene and it's so underwritten in the most perfectly written way I really do think Tom understands love better than just about anyone and young houseman looks at Moe and says, would you mind if I moved out but live somewhere near? You know, it's so heartbreaking so, and the play is from the point of view of the old man who's slightly losing it and so he's the unreliable narrator and he says, you know, without even a fourth wall to walk through or without a window to jump out of, you know, I don't have to be accurate because I'm old and crazy and so it's his journey through time and it's also his collision with Oscar Wilde. One of the things I love so much about doing it we did it in the millennium is that it is a millennial play, right? Because houseman came of age at the last millennium, you know, and so it's about bonfire night and looking out over the bonfires and wondering what the next century is gonna bring and I was directing it as why 2K was happening and as our new century was coming, right? And in fact, I tell a story in the book about how my house almost burned down during Invention of Love because I had a party for all the actors on New Year's Eve leading into the new millennium in 2001 and I left the ashes of a fire that we had in the fireplace in a bag and they started to burn and the next day we were in tech for Invention of Love and I got this phone call saying you better go home, there firemen all around your house and the house was filled with smoke and they had to break down the door and we had to move out for six months. So I directed the play all the tech in my same old clothes for three weeks and that was really kind of apocalyptic and perfect for the Invention of Love but I found the play immensely moving. This desiccated man played by Jamie Cromwell in our production longing for someone that he was never going to have but allowing literature, the pursuit of the classics to fill him up in some way and the image of gay love was Theseus and Perthues. The love of these two men, the comrades that die on the field together, Achilles and Petroclus and that classical literature is full of the love that could not speak its name but that got transmorphed into beautiful poetry and it's also this argument between Houseman and Oscar Wilde about what's more important, living the life, burning the flame and dying for it as Wilde did or living a completely repressed, desiccated, uninteresting life but writing the love in the poetry and an interesting side note of that play is that Tom Stoppard and Daniel Mendelson got into this real fight in the New York review of books because Mendelson accused Tom of siding with the wrong character in the play and of kind of giving short shrift to Houseman's life and Tom said to him, you've misread the play entirely just because I give Oscar Wilde great arguments doesn't mean I'm on his side. I found, he said, I found Houseman's reticence and kind of wound much more moving than I found Oscar Wilde's explosion of sort of self-indulged, self-indulgent narcissism and so that really moved me. It was a fabulous adventure to work on that play. I had an acting company so I could use my whole company. Stephen Anthony Jones is great play. It's a big play, yeah. It's a company play. He played Karron, Marco Berricelli, one of my favorite actors in the world. He played Oscar Wilde and Marco who is fearless, who played Richard III in front of 2000 people at Ashland and was never scared almost threw up before every performance of Invention of Love because he had to sing a little bit of patience of Gilbert and Sullivan as Oscar Wilde and he wasn't a singer. And I do want to say one thing about that acting companies to me are the most beautiful important thing we have. Talk about it a little bit. You say, you believe in ensembles, right? I believe in ensembles with all my heart whether it's a jazz ensemble, a ballet ensemble, a modern dance ensemble or an acting ensemble but we don't believe in it anymore in the American theater. And I do know that the reason Tom Stoppard loved, loved, loved coming back to ACT is he loved our company. So when he knew Marco was gonna play Oscar Wilde, do you know? Or when he knew Anthony Fusco was gonna play the lead in Night and Day playing Carson, who's kind of a desiccated character or that Steve Jones indeed was gonna play the African dictator, he wasn't worried ever that Renee Augustin would play Ruth and then she would play Annie and the real thing and then she would play whatever, that all of them. Gregory Wallace got to play Tristan Zara in Travesties because he was in our company. Where else in America at that time would you have seen a black actor playing Tristan Zara? But that was our company. It was multicultural, multi, everything, multi-generational, gay, straight but those were great actors and they worked with Tom and me over many, many years. And so when he came, he always knew that they would know the rules of play. They knew what Tom loved, which was clarity of utterance. That's what he always talked about. Just as Pinter knew that those actors would hold the stage, I tell lots of stories. I tell a story about, which I won't repeat here but of Marco meeting Pinter and Stoppard in London and how much he loved that. But I think for both those actors, for both those writers, Pinter had been in an acting company in Ireland, a Shakespeare company over many years. He knew what the transformative power of acting was and that if you had really wonderful theater actors, not movie stars, theater actors who could transform, you could do, let us say, celebrations set in an upscale at the IV or something in London and then switch and do the room or it was actually in the opposite order which was in a working class bed set and those actors could transform and that taught an audience what the nature of acting was and they loved that because they revered that imagination, that theatricality. And so, I mean, I think in a way, it's the essence of trying to cast a Pinter play or a Stoppard play. One of the things I learned, again, the sports metaphor is in a way, every actor, particularly in Pinter has to be a leading man because they're gonna come up to bat and when they come up to bat, even if they only come up to bat once, like PD at the end of the birthday party, they have to knock that ball home. And so you need remarkable actors even in the really small role. So for me, Invention of Love was a celebration of company and it was a celebration of the new millennium. You know, it was sort of putting on stage everything I believed about theater and language and history and why we need to in some way be tied to our own histories at the same time that we need to look to the future. Sappho, you know, love poetry, all of those things. And it was a celebration of by then a long-term collaboration with Stoppard and to open the new millennium with him in the room with this acting company, that was really moving to me. It was a very melancholy play but also I thought really a play about hope. Yeah. Yeah, and I think you really did create meaning of our lives the meaning, what does theater mean? What does directing mean? What does acting mean? What is writing for the theater mean? So I think it really helps us and art should do that, you know, to understand where we come from, where we are, where we are going to. I think you often in the book say this is when Obama got elected and this is when Bush came in, this is when 9-11 happened. This is the beginning of the financial era. This is the other one. And I think you quote Rahm Emanuel, Obama's staff, chief of staff, we say a crisis is a terrible thing to waste and that, you know, there is a deep connection also, you know, in a way to the present political reality. I know Stoppard himself, you know, so deeply engaged with the free theater of Belarus or the Czech Mahával, he engaged more and more and saw a connection. How do you see theater and arts and politics? You know, I mean, we live in the zeitgeist, right? And so my feeling is always it's least interesting when art talks directly about a certain political moment because it's too literal and journalism does it better. But every artist lives in the zeitgeist of the moment in which they find themselves. And so you can't help. But this is why I love Greek tragedy, right? Because if you think about Sophocles, let's say, he was writing about the crisis of war, imperialism, immigration, gender, justice, everything he was, they were wrestling within 5th century Athens, but setting it in a mythic past. So it was metaphoric. That to me is where theater is great. So I think in both Stoppard and Pinter, it's very rarely literal or didactic. It's not saying to you, this is what you have to feel. This group of people is right. This point of view is you have to fight for this political thing and not that thing. But for Pinter, he always said even the birthday party for him was a political play because when PD looks at Stanley and screams, Stan, don't let them tell you what to do. It is about fighting for individual rights in a totalitarian world. I think for Stoppard, when you can defamiliarize language, when you can give language currency again, you have saved the world from fascism. And I think he really believed that because he was a central European Jew, he was particularly moved by Havel. And Havel struggles to survive the Soviet occupation of Czechoslovakia and the banality of language. And God knows we are in a moment in our own culture from the left and the right when language has been absolutely co-opted and words don't mean what they used to mean or we have to use other words because we're not allowed to use these words. Everyone is policing language and so language becomes meaningless and it's where art has to re-intervene, has to, to defamiliarize the language again as Wittgenstein said, to take it out to wash and bring it back. And the great theater does that. And so, you know, I think in that sense, both of them are really radical politically. You know, people think Stoppard is conservative because once he voted for Maggie Thatcher but he also fought incredibly hard for Soviet Jewry. He fought, you know, to overturn communism, you know, in Czechoslovakia for freedom of speech. I think that is for Pinter and Stoppard the most important thing always was that artists be free. That's why they really fought for the Belarus Free Theater free to express without censorship of any kind. So language has to be free and the press has to be free. So Stoppard has written a lot about journalism and the press. And I think it's why those plays stay so alive and invigorated and aren't dated. I don't think they'll date because they're not about literal topical things. In that sense, they're very universal, but I think they really do engage with the fight of the individual, the individual artist, the individual human being to push back against tyranny of all kinds, tyranny of thought. And that's why I close the book with, which I'll give to you. Maybe Rita, yeah, you have, you're coming closer to the end. You have a, maybe we wait the beginning and read something from the end. Well, I struggled with how to end the book because I worried a lot about whether I was writing something that would matter to anybody anymore. Going through this terrible time of COVID, you know, I'm writing about these two great male straight white playwrights. You know, does that matter anymore? Would their work matter anymore? Would people care about their work in times to come? And you, Frank, did a genius thing during COVID. You interviewed. I really followed it religiously. You interviewed great theater artists around the world to connect all of us during COVID in thinking about the world today. And so I was watching one, one day of Abhijit Mujemdar, the playwright, professor, director. And he said something. And I thought, well, that has to be the end of the book. So this is the last two paragraphs of the book. Where were you born then? Asked and asked Davies and the caretaker. This is a question that would seem completely innocuous in the hands of almost any other playwright, but not in Pinterland. What do you mean Davies replies darkly? Suddenly, we are brought up short. A world of possibility opens up in front of us. Nothing's taken for granted. What does it mean to ask about someone's origins? How do any of us actually know or indeed prove who we are and where we come from? What game is being played as Davies challenges asked him? These questions can be analyzed forever, but their theatrical power is best discovered in the rehearsal room all the time as actors experiment, iterate and expose what's lurking underneath. After all, only an actor could insert as does the player in Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are dead. I extract significance from melodrama, a significance which it does not in fact contain, but occasionally from out of this matter, there escapes a thin beam of light that's seen at the right angle can crack the shell of mortality. End quote. I love that quote. It is no surprise that two playwrights with such complex and shifting identities felt so completely at home in a comic existential universe in which nothing is a given and everything is possible. When we have found all the mysteries and lost all the meaning, we will be alone on an empty shore, Septimus tells Thomasina in Arcadia, then we will dance. She replies. It is my belief that Pinterest stopper's work will keep dancing far into the future. As I was completing this book musing from the isolation of my pandemic lockdown about what significance these plays might have in our post theatrical lives, I chanced to hear a comment by the noted Indian professor playwright director Abhishek Mujamdar. He confided to Frank Hensher in a recorded interview that quote, I don't think I would have survived the deaths in India during the pandemic if I hadn't simultaneously been reading Tom stoppards, the coast of utopia and quote. Mujamdar went on to explain that surrounded by anxiety, disease and governmental abdication throughout India, he had found deep comfort in the aesthetic and humanist arguments of literary critic Balinsky, one of stoppards finest creations quote, I'm losing my health and making enemies all over the shop exclaims the struggling Balinsky in part one of the coast of utopia. Because I believe literature alone can even now redeem our honor, even now in words alone that have ducked and dodged their way past the sensor literature can be become can at which point he runs out of breath and self confidence for a moment before resuming. Art has the right to be useless and end in itself for its own sake. It only has to be true. Not true to the facts, not true to appearances, but true to the inmost innermost doll where genius and nature are the same stuff. That's what makes an artist moral end quote. And then I just end by saying it seems so fitting to me that those passionate and sputtering words put by Tom stoppard into the mouth of an idealistic Russian critic in the 1830s could save a contemporary Indian artist from despair during a global pandemic in the 21st century. What more could a playwright ask for? It's true. Incredible. What a quote. And yes, and I remember that also desperation in that talk was Abishak. And then also that hope that, you know, he was hanging on to and he said I remember he said I'm going to call. I have 140 calls still to make this night. Went after that. That call and I will hold on from India and came out of that. Listen, thank you, Carrie. That really was to the force of a director's view on stoppard and on pinter, overpinter land and stoppard land. And everybody who loves theater, everybody who watches theater, everybody also wants to direct. And I think it was a great experience. And I think it was quite a book full of little jewels, a little bookcase, a little jewelry box that Carrie put together. And also it's lived experience. We recorded through research. And how long did you work on that book? How long did it take you? Besides your life of directing? I mean, it took me the year of COVID. And I got very lucky because I worked with a director of the film, a director of the film, and he was introduced to me by the great Ambo guard. And Anna said to me, make sure you include your own life. Because just what you said. About the political framework. One exists as an artist in time. And so much of my experience with pinter and stoppard was connected to my own life from when my daughter, Lexi was born. And I tell a story in the book about her being a 10 day old baby in rehearsal with pinter. And she was born as a prop in a rehearsal in order to generate feeling from an actor. All the way to the point where my son, Nick, who's a musician sat in the back of the room of the Geary with Tom stopper during the hard problem. And he created the whole sound score for it. With Tom on his headphones. Tom who had known Nick since he was a baby crawling in the back of the theater. So, you know, my children's lives and my husband and myself and my own struggles as an artistic leader, my struggles to keep my theater going. Are all part of my journey with pinter and stoppard. And they defined that journey. For me and Anna Brewer, the editor said to me, they have to be part of your life. Come to a bean also said, make it a portrait of those two men as you knew them in rehearsal. So that's what I tried to do. It's not by a biography, but it's how they revealed themselves to me in rehearsal. And, you know, I, because I'm so sad we lost pinter in 2008. And I think about them all the time and treasure my time with him and stoppard. This is a little part of their bio. I think it's an honest, serious, very personal report of your engagement with those giants of theater. And I think the world is better for it. And we all learned a lot. So really, really. February 25th, Frank. February 25th, right. Right from Bloomsbury, Matthew and or if you can stand it on Amazon right now, you can. And there's a free chapter on our Google drive from all the writers who we have in our book series. So they graciously. Bloomsbury allowed us also to have the Jewish connection, the chapter for free. So if you look at our email, you can get to that. It's quite a unique thing. So thank you, Carrie. And we're going to go on Wednesday. We're going to talk to the great and Katanio and her book, The Art of Dramaturgy. And Bogart will be without next Monday. And then next Wednesday, Avra, Cyrilopoulou and Frank Rabbats from Greece and Germany will talk about tragedies, staging 21st century tragedies, you know, the tragedies we are experiencing. How do we stage them? Aiko. They will talk about her book, a body in Fukushima at the end of December. And already with us with Bonnie Muranke, timelines, writings and conversation. Teresa Smalig about the great run water from the booster group and Alexis Green, Emily Mann shared with us their work in life, Emily Mann, Rebel artists of the American theater US. So thank you really for staying with us, taking this talk also so serious and sharing your journey in theater in your life, but also with those two great artists. Thanks to Halround again for hosting us, and Vijay and Thea. This is so fantastic that we can be with you. Thanks to my Segal team. And Andy Tanvi in Mumbai, actually, and who we connected through Abhijak to her and to Kakta's Jews so and everyone. So thank you so much. And I hope to see you all again into our audience. Really thank you for taking the time to listen. It means a lot to us. It means a lot to the writers. These are important books there, important reflection there of our time of the moment, but yet they look back very far and they also do look in the future. So thank you for taking the time and know how much is out there. So it means the world to us. Bye-bye. And I hope one day we'll have a cup of coffee. Bye-bye. Thank you. Bye-bye.