 around again and of course they stand a little bit for our new worries about this new mutation of the corona virus that came out. And I think we are all worried. And one of the reasons we have our guests with us today is also because we are talking about a book, Teresa Smalek wrote about a significant important and consequential New York performer Ron Water who in the time, you know, the AIDS crisis in terrible conditions with his group. And also he himself created great work, great theater and responding to, yes, in a way, a virus. So welcome everybody, welcome John and welcome Teresa. And also have Marianne with us who just brought her son to school or picked him up. Otter, otter, otter. And the daughters, Jesus. Yes. And so where are you all, John? Where are you? I'm in New York. You're just back from Italy, right? At the Bellagio? Exactly, and I'm in New York. I'm, you know, the foundation that also played a role in Ron's life at the end of his career. Teresa, you are somewhere in our part of us, right? At a CUNY college, some? Yes, I'm in the Bronx. I'm in a classroom here. Which college is it? Bronx Community College of the City University of New York. Well, you teach in Marianne? You are? Hi guys, I'm in San Francisco. Wow. So it's also early for you, right? Yes, it's been a mad dash, but here we are. Here we are, yes. Thea from Holland who is also based in Los Angeles and she has to, you know, start with us working before 9 o'clock, which is an unholy time for everybody. But again, let's focus on what we are here to talk about. It's part of the Segal Center book series. We decided to talk about books, books that were finished, written and conceived in the time of Corona. It's a remarkable lineup. A lot of women feel arrived and also put things together and most of them and all of them were part of our Segal talks. So we thought so much has been shown now that much is discussed. Let's focus on books about theater performance and help us understanding our field, our life and also the world better and to create some meaning. So a few words about Teresa. Teresa is the order of life in performance. It came out in 2020 Segal books and she wrote for numerous and many, many magazines, New England Theater Journal, The Great P.A.J., Journal of Performance and R, The Great T.D.R., Papa Tree International Theater Journal, Theater Survey, Theater Research International. Anything you have to do to become a recognized, good and great academic. And she is teaching in the Bronx and is teaching theater to students and she is curates a literary section for an online journal, The TypeScript and her interests are theater and performance studies, media studies, gender and politics. And she holds an MA in English on the University of Western Ontario and PhD in performance studies from NYU with Richard Schachner who we also will talk about who kind of guided her also in the book project and where he was also looking at his own work and own life. I can only imagine how these conversations must have been. Then we have John Jesseran who was from 79 to 82, the assistant of the Dick Cavett show on PBS which is a big claim to fame in the world and not everybody knows that. And he of course also interviewed a really significant people they've learned a lot. He always said that that time somehow the television, writing, speaking, organizing, scheduling that informed also his work later on in theater. He did over 40 pieces for the theater but he is very much known for the 66 episode Chang and Avoid Moon, which got the best award. A fantastic, brilliant, I think M-series that reacted onto the world of television, the visual, but also the reality, the idea of reality that seemed to infiltrate our world and theater but with imagination and fictional setting actually and not in reproduction of it. He got very significant awards for his work which also in deep sleep, we've got the Obie Award, Whitewater, Black Maria, Shatterhand Massacre, I would say is a great play too and his fellowships include the Rome Prize, Rockefeller, Guggenheim Foundation, Asian Cultural Council Foundation, MacArthur Fellow, all of us really would love to get about, we never do, but he did it and his projects include Faust, How I Rose at Bam also was he collaborated with Marianne and many, many other things. And why we talk to him is also because of his work on phylloctatis variations with Ron Waller and much, much more, of course, will be done and his phylloctatis actually will be presented in 2002, next February in Mexico City by the great director, Martin Acosta in Mexico where he has a real following of his work. And you can see on La Mama's website his Chang episodes. Marianne Williams also is part of the fabric of the New York theater downtown scene for all of our listeners around the world. She is in theater and opera director and she created and founded the award-winning New York based theater company, the Builders Organization. Anybody who looks at experimental work of the last decades in contemporary, you will know the Builders Association and influential ensemble that had created a significant body of work at the forefront of integrating media and live performance. And I think this is also what unites both John and Marianne and she has created over 17 original large-scale productions which is a lot, worked with the famous architect, Stila and Scofidio, the National Center for Supercomputing Applications, the South Asian Arts Collective, Motoroti and so, so much more. She has been basically to every significant festival around the world, met lots of museum work also at the Whitney and she had very many creative roles but one of them, and this is also why she is here is she was a dramaturg at the Worcester Group at the very crucial time of the company where she also worked, it was very close to him and actually before he left on his plane, I think in Beladio, she was one who will talk to him last and had to say goodbye and he died on the flight back but we will come to that later. She also worked with David Byrne, Susan Sontag and V-Girls and many, many others and at the moment and this is where she is joining us from, she's the professor of theater arts at the University of Santa Cruz and she was the head of graduate directing at Carnegie Mellon University and created an influential program that's called Integrative Design, Arts and Technology. So thank you all for joining me. I think it is important we get a little inside of what you are really doing. My name is Frank Henschkamp, the director of the Segal Center and before we say a little bit about the book, I would like to ask Theresa, read us a passage from the book, something you wrote and then we'll ask you why you took 10 years of your life to create this book. Thank you, Frank. Thank you so much for having me and thank you, John and Mary Ann for coming on to talk with me about the book. I'm going to read from the introduction, Stories of Origin, which is about sort of challenging the myths of how Ron Vatter came into experimental theater without any training or background in theater. Many in the theater community know the legend about the disaffected army recruiter who stumbled upon the performance groups, environmental production of Sam Shepard's The Tooth of Crime, 1973 at their downtown theater, the performing garage. However, scholars have a harder time explaining Vatter's remarkable rise in the experimental theater scene first at TPG, the performance group and then with the Wooster Group. Even in the early 1970s, an era in which both non-performers and the non-professional ensemble were valued, it was not every day that someone with no prior exposure to theater went on to become what Ron, sorry, what Ross Wetstein described as the quintessential ensemble performer, the supreme downtown actor, going so far as to canonize Vatter as Saint Ron. It was in a 1989 article titled Saint Ron. Contrary to the myth, Vatter's metamorphosis from our army recruiter to avant-garde actor was not inadvertent. While a number of critics, perhaps recycling the same misinformation posit Manhattan as the site of Vatter's accidental entry into theater, he actually started acting at Shaker High School in Latham, New York, while still a teenager. In 1967, Vatter entered Siena College, a liberal arts college located near Albany in Loudonville, New York. There he joined the student drama club known as the Little Theater. Over the next four years, Vatter built his reputation as one of the club's principal actors and directors. He performed in close to a dozen campus productions. As a student director, he oversaw several pioneering initiatives, including an intermediate version of the 1959 Broadway musical Rashomon. Vatter's 1970 rendition incorporated a silent film into the live stage performance. The following year, he directed a production of John Herbert's 1967 play, Fortune and Men's Eyes, a controversial prison drama about a young offender's homosexual awakening. By the time he graduated from Siena College in May 1971, Vatter had starred in several productions in the region's amateur theaters. He played Edmund in a long day's journey into night with the slingerland community players and Tom in the glass menagerie at the Albany Civic Center. In autumn 1971, Vatter went on to pursue graduate studies in drama at Stanford University. His time at Stanford was brief. He came home the following year and returned to the campus stage at the State University of New York at Albany, although he did not enroll in a degree program there. At SUNY Albany, Vatter starred as Jean-Paul Marat. In Professor Jark, is it Jarka Burrians? Production of Peter Wiesest, the persecution and assassination of Jean-Paul Marat as performed by the inmates of Sharrington under the direction of the Marquis de Sade staged in October 1972. Why has this formative period of Vatter's career been overlooked? Part of my task is to account for the gaps and emissions that hinder a fuller understanding of his body of work. Wonderful. Thank you. Really, really, thank you. It gives us an idea. And he went to a state college, which is great for us. SUNY and SUNY are so connected. And really, if I understand right, from 77 to 91, he played lead roles in almost every Wooster Group production and yet his stage presence and his also interpersonal skills and management. He also, I think, Shackler in the beginning invited him to also run the company. We are foundational to that really significant, world-famous and influential companies. Many people say they are like three things of what is the post-modern theater is of Wilson, Hannibal and the Wooster Groups, LSD. So this is really what we're talking about is quite the essential of what theater is about, was about and is regarded as significant and important and meaningful. And he was such an important part of the creation. So, Teresa, why did you, why do you write about him? Why do you think he's so significant? Well, Richard Shackler has a lot to do with this. When I came to him with a dissertation topics, I had a lot of trendy topics. And he said, no, no, no, no. And then I said, well, what about Ron Potter? And he was like, yes, that would make a good dissertation topic. And so part of it was, simply the fact that Richard Shackler, my dissertation advisor at NYU, knew Ron Potter and had worked with him closely. And at around the same time that I, you know, there was a screening of Jill Godmallow's film, Roy Cohn, Jack Smith. I missed the screening, but I went to see it at the Boap's library. And I was haunted by that show, by the two characters he played, Roy Cohn and Jack Smith. And I thought, what if fast, you know, it's fascinated by his ability to transform into those men and by his own connection to them. But the fact that he did this while he was, while he had, well, he had AIDS. And so, you know, I really didn't, I never met him. I didn't know anything about him, but I decided that this was, you know, the topic I could research. I had Shackler to help me find the initial people from the performance group, some people from the Wooster group. And, you know, I, the more I dove in, the more I found out about him, that was contrary to the known legend, the deeper I started digging to find out, you know. Find out about him. Yes, and he's someone who has been perhaps slightly, you know, not at the main light on the stages when it comes to reflecting about a New York theater, perhaps in a way also as John's work and also Marion's work. Even so, everybody in the theater world do know about them. And he was quite a fascinating, incredible character. He was also Green Beret. He came from a military family and he was a Franciscan seminar. He wanted to become a priest in the military and gave it up. He then actually studied English literature and had a degree in that. He was a soldier. He was known to come 17, 18 times to watch performances at the Worcester group and nobody know who this guy was in uniform watching them. It made the company uncomfortable. He then somehow morphed into it. He was an actor, but also taking, I think, directions as a soldier, but then also reinventing it, doing his own work. He used to put ashes of Jack Smith, the legendary underground, complicated, underground performer in his makeup for the philoxidist performances John worked on. He was a great dancer. He, if I understand what, got naked by the before rehearsals. If that's all through the bus at every rehearsal he would just get naked and then undress again, had an outgoing life in the next two, his work and in the theater company. He was a great friend to so many talk drugs and almost like Molière, who died on stage, I think in a way when Walters death was so close. He was at last, so he was in the coffin and the philoxidist we will speak about it later and basically died also on stage. John, what comes to your mind when you think about Ron? Oh, well, yeah, I don't know. I've been thinking a bit about all this. I mean, there's a lot to think about and yes, we're talking about his life as an actor and his life on this world. And I knew him during the Worcester group times and that's how I'd gotten to know him. But, and then as the 90s started to loom and obviously we heard that he'd been sick and et cetera. But I think, from the time that he asked me to work to philoxides for him, he seemed to be somebody on a mission. He knew he wasn't gonna be around. And so this idea of being an actor and being present all the time, he was seemed to be already preparing for the time when he would not be present and he might have to be present in a different way. And so I think this play was a way of him continuing his life beyond the grave. It sounds a little bit morbid, but we talked about all those things. What do we do if you die? Do I ride it? Do you die in the end of this? Or what? We even joke about all that kind of stuff. So that kind of- How will the play end? Where he was many layers of his personality and stuff. But to me, that sort of ending time was, he seemed to be preparing for another act. So where he actually was not going to be a live actor or any more. So anyway, but that's- We're gonna, yeah, Marianne, tell us a bit. Well, first I just wanna say congratulations to Teresa. That is like a major labor of love to spend 10 years on a book. Usually it's six or seven, but that was an amazing feat. And hi, everybody. It's so nice to see you guys. So just to, I mean, it's fun to hear all this stuff because there are of course a million things you could say on top of it. Just, I mean, I wrote a couple of things down. One funny thing is at the garage, when he came and watched those shows, as Frank said, he's like sad in the audience for like 17 versions of, I don't know what it was, I guess, yeah. It was a crime. It was a crime, yeah. The thing that was unnerving to all of them was this gaze that he had. It wasn't that he was a non-actor or an actor or whatever, it was that he just sat in the audience and stared at them with these hypnotic eyes that many people have talked about. And that's what made him so uncomfortable. I mean, in addition to wearing a suit, an army uniform, he looked like some kind of like maniacal figure. So I think when he, so, and they always say, like finally he came up one day and said, I wanna be a part of this. And they were all like, oh, thank God, you know, he's not CIA or something because it was completely unclear what he had been doing there. And, you know, another thing I think that is kind of under acknowledged is that he, I think he was actually a dramaturg in some ways. I mean, he suggested a lot of the texts that came forward in the Worcester group. So like, I think he suggested Long Bay's journey in tonight. And I know he suggested Three Sisters because he knew Paul Schmidt basically from the bars. So he brought Paul in and said, you know, let's do this check off piece. So that's just a little sideline. But the other thing vis-a-vis what you were saying, Theresa, about, so the trajectory of AIDS is that I think John's right that he, Roy Conjack Smith was kind of a statement about living with AIDS and phylloctetes was definitely about dying. And his, you know, passion, I think for John's work and John was really about trying to harness that moment in a way that was like a final statement, much more than Roy Conjack Smith. That's, I think I'll stop there. Yeah, so Theresa, we also now live in a way in a time of Corona and maybe I'm thinking about it because we had this incredibly long talk, but also we live in a time even though it's so very different virus out there, even theaters are closed. So it's much more serious in the way for the theater companies, but for the theater community, the AIDS crisis was a horrific, at the time it really meant social death perhaps, you know, next also to a physical death. That was, you think you wrote, there's no cure. You lost your job. People had to make excuses to go to the funerals if they had a job because there were so many and there was no help. And now we have Corona. Do you see, did you think about this when you were writing, when you finished last year, your 10 year journey, your marathon? Well, Corona virus wasn't a thing when I finished this book, you know, I finished it in 2019 and then it took a while for it to get published, you know, it was in production. So I didn't think about it as I was writing, but certainly now in retrospect, you know, I think there are connections and you know, I picked a segment, a section to read about the loctaties and about, well, I'll just, I mean, the stigmas attached to having AIDS, to having HIV. And, you know, I was thinking about why Ron Potter picked that particular place. So I'll just... Maybe we do it towards the end more, you know, of the cop, yeah. Okay, but I think, you know, it was this, like Corona virus is today, I mean, I think Corona virus is a stigmatized illness, even though people are much more open, you know, I have friends on Facebook who say, oh, I have, you know, vaccinated friends and well, actually only vaccinated friends have come out and said, oh, I got COVID. But I think there is a stigma attached to it and there was especially early on, there was a fear, you know, first, when I first saw the masks, I feared the masks, now I fear people without masks in close spaces. And there is this real sense that if you come down with, you know, for people who are in socially precarious or physicians, if you come down with the virus, you could easily lose your job, you could miss several weeks' work and lose your housing. I mean, I have friends who are in that position, you know, students, you could, I mean, you could lose a semester of school. There's so many things at stake, I think, and especially for people of color and minorities, when you get sick, there's a tremendous amount at stake. And I think Ron Potter realized that. And I've talked with, I mean, I remember talking with Marianne about her activism and in ACT UP and going with him to doctors trying to find non-traditional remedies. But I do think he understood and became angry or maybe not angry, I don't know if angry is the right word, but more and more political, when he saw what was at stake for stigmatized communities with AIDS. So I think the stigma is definitely there, you know, not the same stigma, but there certainly is a COVID stigma. That's my sense. Can I just add, one thing that I found at the beginning of the Corona crisis was that there was this kind of PTSD for people who had lived through the AIDS crisis because of the sense of bewilderment. There was just no, nobody had any idea what was gonna happen. And so, you know, the refrigerated trucks, the morgues in Brooklyn, I think were really pronounced in terms of like reliving that trauma. You know, I mean, once it became clear that everyone was working on a vaccine, everyone globally, I think that eased off, but at the beginning, that sense of being, of it being helpless and tearing through the world without any, you know, remedy was very reminiscent for me. I saw a play, the first play that came back, you know, it was called Blindness at the Daryl Ross Theater in Union Square. I saw that and I wrote about it for theater journal like it's coming out soon. But she, she characterized, you know, she, the, no, it was a male playwright, but the female protagonist, the narrator, you saw this play in utter darkness, socially distanced, but there was a plague of blindness and epidemic of blindness. People began losing their vision. And I thought that this was a very interesting metaphor, both for COVID and for AIDS. She was the, the narrator was the only person who somehow miraculously, although she was sub, you know, completely surrounded and for, you know, confined, she was confined to a mental hospital with her husband and other infected people, but somehow miraculously she never became infected. She could see and she could help them. And it turned out later on at the end of the play that other women could presumably see as well that they had been pretending to be blind in order to help loved ones who were, who were in quarantine. And I thought, you know, this willful blindness, how many of us really are willfully and fortunately able to not see the realities of, well, I never saw the realities of the AIDS crisis. I never really thought, no, that's not true. I studied them academically. I didn't. You're well there, yeah. Yeah. And then with COVID blissfully, I'm, you know, middle class academic with her own home. So I, you know, and car. So I could really avoid the ice, you know, what, you know, I could really avoid much of what communities of color and poor people, you know, people who live in poverty who had, who were essential workers had to go through. But that plays fascinating. If anyone has a chance to see it, I highly recommend it. Yeah. A question for John in a way. I think Roy Cohen, Roy Cohen, Jack Smith was a solo performance. He kind of left in a way also the Worcester who has an ensemble. He was a great ensemble member if I understand right. And always the team was significant to him. And, and he was open about the intention. I'm going to read his opening monologue, not open remarks. Normally, especially also in post-traumatic work, he tried to be obscure. You don't want to explain. You don't want to understand, you know, that there shouldn't be a lear sterk and educational play. And he broke with that. And he in front of that, that play where he played that wild downtown outgoing artist or Jack Smith who did the, you know, the flaming creatures video and this right wing, a cynical lawyer who, you know, was part of McCarthy's campaign. And the model openly the model of Donald Trump, he was an advisor to him and Trump said, he learned everything from him. And it came to court cases at legal cases that you have to avoid and lie and not to tell the truth. So he played both. And even they were two separate projects that then came together. And he said, I'm a living, I'm a person living with AIDS. And for my own purposes, I've taken only particular aspects of their personalities and balanced one against each other. This is not a documentary, but rather a subjective reaction. A response to the lives of two very different white male homosexuals who had two powerful things in common, a virus, a society which thought to repress their homosexuality. So he explained, and it was a reaction of this theater community to to that crisis. The question is, so what did it mean to you as a theater artist to have Ron taking such a statement? You mean in Roy Calhoun, Jack Smith? Yeah. And in general, that he kind of traumatized, which is a history of the Worcester group. This kind of autobiographical or self-biographical work to put it on stage, mix it with found tax, combine tax, but also in a social or political, one could say, activism. And what did it mean for the scene at that time? Well, I think it meant that he was stepping out of a lot of things. He was stepping out of the Worcester group. He was stepping out of how people would use to view him as an ensemble member, as an actor, as this guy with his beautiful eyes, who would be around. And he was stepping into this whole other world. He was stepping into a whole other world. And he was in a way trying to take us with him. But he was trying to take us with him, but in a way we were all going along with him anyway, because we had to. But he was kind of, he would say, okay, I'll go into that dark room first in a way, and then you guys can come behind me. So I think that's what he was doing to me, was he was stepping into this whole another world, meaning I'm on the stage, but I'm off the stage. I'm an actor, I'm not an actor. I'm a sick person. I'm a dying person, and that's who I am now. So in a way, I mean he was kind of from a brutally honest about it. But at the same time, he was kind of, I always have to say at the same time, he still had a kind of a sense of humor about it all actually. It wasn't all particularly a doom and gloom, because I think he also could see other younger people behind him. That's, you know, we're going to continue on. So anyway, so that's kind of, I think a lot of people saw, saw him like, he was kind of a leader actually, without being a poster boy for a cause in particular. So, yeah. I think Marianne has a great statement about, or a great quote about this in the book on page 191. So do you want me to just read the section? If you give me a hint what it's about, I can probably get to us. Okay. So you talked during one of our interviews, you talked about how as a lifelong Wooster group member, Ron Potter was deeply firmly embedded in a tradition of obfuscation. And you said that for him to get up there in Roy Cohn, Jack Smith, and be almost polemical, you know, to explain what he was doing. And I think that to him was the most beautiful act. You said that. And meanwhile, Schekner vividly recall the moment during the introduction where Potter lifted his shirt and showed his AIDS induced lesions. That's what Schekner saw, although other people say no, he never had lesions. But according to Schekner, it was brave and horrific. But as HIV positive diagnosis had been fraught with fear and shame, the contrast is aesthetic coming out as a performer with AIDS was a brave and liberating act. But I think that tradition of obfuscation that the Wooster group sort of, you know, has engaged in throughout their history. This was a departure from that for him where he wasn't. Mary Ann, what do you think about it? I mean, I can't believe I said that. Yeah, that's true. I think his, the prologue was certainly more polemical as Frank said, than any Wooster group show. But then, you know, the fact is Jack Smith like embodied everything that, you know, bore the Wooster group. So the fact that he chose this really insane, ridiculous, fabulous monologue, you know, is firmly embedded in that tradition. I mean, and you know, as John says, I mean, it was hilarious. That's the thing about Ron. It's that it wasn't self serious. It wasn't, you know, bemoaning his fate. It was like this celebration of the absurdity of, you know, the avant-garde in a way. Yeah. And also celebrating an artist. I saw the show in Berlin, actually is one of the greatest shows I've ever seen in my life. You know, you know, you know, you know, you know, you know, you could feel that he, you know, whatever realness means on stage, we have so much been written and thought about, you know, but you could feel it was someone and you knew it also is dying. And why did you want to work with him? Why did you came so close to him? Well, he was extremely magnetic. You know, he was like a dancer and a performer and a person. I mean, he was exactly like he is on stage. So that kind of just depth and I think. Irony and hilarity was really appealing at that time. I guess that's why. Can't remember. You know, within the group, this kind of like stealth star. I wasn't interested in his stardom, but I think his power as a performer was like, you can't be underestimated. Yeah. Incredible to think that there were productions where, you know, Ron Water, Spaulding Gray, Willem de Vaux, we're all in one place, right? Put it together. You could see and watch him before the, he went on to the Philarctities. You with Susan Sontag and Greg Martin, you worked on a play called Dark, Dark Victory. Teresa, I think that I'll tell us a little bit. What was that about? Well, very briefly. So Susan also came to shows repeatedly. And so we saw her in the audience at in Braceup, the three sisters Worcester group show, I don't know, 50 times or something. I mean, it was like insane. And she always sat at the front row. So it would be like, and now we're performing for Susan Sontag. So she, I think that she approached Ron about doing something. And he said, yeah, let's, you know, I want to involve Greg and Mary Ann for some obscure reason. And so we spent a lot of time kicking ideas around with her in her like amazing penthouse and, you know, Chelsea towers. And we settled on this Betty Davis movie, Dark Victory, which is like this completely melodramatic. Again, hilarious over the top film about death, death and dying. So we went to the, to Bellagio. John, I can't believe you were there. And which was, you know, extraordinary because it was a very magic mountain experience. You know, we're like nestled in between the Swiss and Italian Alps in this incredible Palazzo and Ron was dying. So, you know, we would be in his room. In this kind of intense bubble with Susan and Ron and Greg and just trying to unpack what was happening in that moment. Well, purportedly trying to work on this script, which never came to pass. But what happened after, so Ron got sicker and sicker, and we finally went to Milan and put him on the plane. And then he, as Frank said, died. But I wanted to say that in his, as soon as that he touched down in New York, and I think people heard he died or in the days after, John faxed me, faxed me. A excerpt from Philoctetes about a little bird that was really still one of the most beautiful things I've ever read. So it was extraordinary time. Do you have that with you? No, most probably not, right? John, do you have it in your head by any chance? I don't have it in my head. Listen, if I read it, I'd probably cry. So I can't do that. But anyway, but yeah, it is. Actually, I remember that. I remember faxing you. I remember your fax back to me. I mean, these are all, you know, there are small kind of physical things, but they also kind of define all the little boundaries of that time period because actually everything was so physical actually all the time. And, you know, somebody's presence and then they were, they were there and then they were not there and, or they were physically very sick. So it was a lot of physical manifestations of things. And I remember all like, I remember that fax and all that kind of stuff. What was it about the bird? Do you remember? It was about a bird and the bird's body and their perception of their body, you know, kind of connected to illness, but not always connected to illness, but that type of a thing. So it will be interesting to think how does contemporary theater react on it? I haven't seen a play with someone with Corona on stage or someone who is actually most probably, you know, might not survive it. You know, what is contemporary theater doing? How are we reacting? I mean, this is incredible what that community at that time under miserable conditions, what it produced. I remember we once had a talk with Gaby Goddard to run the Great Riverside Studios in London. He said, you know, he was at the Berlin Ensemble. He said, I couldn't believe the miserable condition of the Berlin Ensemble they worked in, but they suffered through it and created something incredible, you know, with all the complexities they were in, you know. And I think it is a remarkable testimony and so much had come together. I remember Mel Gordon, a friend and researcher, also died. He talked about the group theater that had changed American acting. He said, actually American acting became different when they were on there and they had kind of a filmic, cinematic acting that went away from that misunderstood Stanislavsky School that was never meant to be anyway. And he said, it actually, what we see in American films comes out of the group theater and David Saffron argued that the Wooster Group and Ron Water remade acting or we look at experimental acting. He said, by not attempting to become a character but merely by standing in for another one using Ron Water, the one who could not be present. Do you feel that his style or do you guys both feel or was that really, it's a big statement, you know, but it's a consequential one, you know, do you feel it is appropriate? I mean, can I, I just need to jump in before I go get my cover board. I mean, listen, I think that that's really true because I think that Ron in particular but even Spalding and Willem embodied this matrix acting. Thank you Michael Kirby. Michael Kirby, yeah. That thing about edging closer to the real on stage was absolutely what they were doing. It was task based. It wasn't about embodying a character. It was about doing, doing it, doing it on stage. As Jackson, if you're not doing anything, do it on stage. So Ron, and I think that this is one of the most significant things about his acting style is before every show, even a show that we had been running for three years would get it before the show, before the audience came in would sketch through his whole part. So he would get on stage and touch everything he was going to touch and say all the words under his breath. And it was like this incredible moment, embodied moment of sketching through something that I think also happened in the performance that he wasn't landing, settling down into a character. It was like a, almost like a visual sketch. You write that. Yeah, John. Was your work on theater or acting? I mean, you also have that very special, you know, a single relation to the actor, the delivery of the lines. Yeah, I mean, I always felt very connected to what the group was doing. But yeah, I always had a very cinematic approach and also an idea of, you know, the actor would just be on this stage. They didn't have to be anyone. They only had to be there. They didn't have to enact or represent something. It was this idea of representation, which to me had been exploded. Once I started working in television way back then, I just thought, well, you know, what is all this representation of characters and what is this all supposed to mean and what are we supposed to believe about it? And I think that Ron did that very, very deftly. But I think it's probably how we look at reality in a way, you know. And even sometimes you couldn't tell if he was, you know, he was just getting through a situation somehow. Maybe not acting, but just being through a situation. There's different ways to be. And I think for an actor, that's a very important thing to learn. There's different ways to be. You just can't learn something and then just keep repeating it. That's really not being actually, that's kind of repeating. But anyway, so yeah, I think he, he, he, and I think a lot of people have adopted. I mean, you see it everywhere. There's just a lot of people have adopted what, what Ron, you see the oddly they've learned how to mimic it or something in a way. And it doesn't, it doesn't come off. It's not the same thing actually. It's not the same thing. But it has had its influence has been very, very good. Yeah. And then he had that role in the Philadelphia movie, where Ace for the first time actually got dramatized on a major movie screen. And, and so that was quite something. It moved over. I know also your Steve Prashimi, who was a company member when he started out, you know, along his basic acting with you, which he also took over. We actually did play the first, well, the first in parting glances, the first person with AIDS on screen actually, I think before Philadelphia. Yeah, before, actually before, you know, you know, this is interesting and, you know, the time, the timeline of all this with living downtown, you know, it was all in a timeline. So by the time Steve did parting glances was 86 or 87, something like that already. The Philadelphia story didn't come till later. So this was a slowly approaching tidal wave. And by the time actually that Ron did Roy Cone, Jack Smith, the tidal wave was just about to completely crash on, completely crash on everybody actually come in a, in a major way. It had been building and building and building. And by the time 94 came around, that was a huge, huge thing. So he kind of left at an interesting point. Yeah, I mean, that's incredible. What stories will tell people in 20, 30 years from now about New York theater and Corona? I wonder what's out there, you know, I'm looking, we are looking. The theaters are closed also, but what is the reaction really? What will be significant? You know, maybe at the time it was also not so clear that this would be, you know, the place that crystallized everything. Teresa, you're at the box and we want to listen to you too. When you did all the research of 10 years, what surprised you? What did you find? What do you say? I didn't expect that. Well, I didn't expect that he had a past and call it. First of all, I did not expect that he had been an actor in college at all. I, I sort of thought he was an army recruiter. Like he said, he was, and he was that, which is actually, you were right in the book. It's not really true. Nobody really knows you. You even looked at a department where he lived and say, did he really walk by there? Was he a recruiter? No, it's not really clear. Was there even a recruiting office? You know, it was a story. You, you write. He also liked to make up stories. Just, you also mentioned it. The idea, it's still a bit post Vietnam war era that a guy wants to be part of the most experimental underground group in New York city or perhaps in the world at the time. And he shows up in his army uniform. It's just incredible in itself, but. He looked up his army record. I got through the freedom of information act. I, most of it was, some of it was redacted, but he did work. You know, his, one of his last projects was in New York city for two weeks. I think in 19, seven in the winter of 1972. Yeah. I think he might have stayed. You know, I think he, he. Stayed here. And with the goal, honestly, of becoming an experimental theater actor. Yeah. That's your line, which is a big discovery. Say, yeah. He came here and wanted to work in downtown experimental theater. Right. And I think Spaulding Gray said, you know, German interview with Spaulding Gray, which was the day before he disappeared before Spaulding Gray committed suicide. He said that Ron became a character in the production as much as anybody on stage. And I asked what kind of a character was he? And he said, well, you know, the kind of, you know, the kind of character he was a guy dressed in an army recruiter, you know, uniform. And so he was himself and he was a character. And I think that was the starting point of Spaulding's fascination with him, that somebody could be themselves and also be playing a character. And Spaulding did a piece called interviewing the audience where they would interview people. About what they had been doing before the show. Yeah. Oh, they got to the show, right? Yeah. That was the show they would put people on stage and say, how did you get here? Yeah, yeah. What were you thinking? Yeah. And Spaulding Gray took that on the road, you know, Ron Flatter didn't go with him, but Spaulding Gray later created a piece that he was called interviewing the audience. So I didn't expect that he had a past actually, you know, but the booster groups archivist had put me in touch with a guy who was the brother of his friends who had gone to college with Ron, you know, the brother had gone to college with Ron. He had been in this Franciscan program. And suddenly the student who had been in this Franciscan program, put me in touch with a guy who had gone to college with Ron. He had been in this Franciscan program. He had been in this Franciscan program, put me in touch with all these other young, well, men who had been in that program, in the Franciscan program, which Ron Flatter was briefly a part of, and who had also been in the theater club. And I met their director, you know, the much older professor. So that I didn't expect. I didn't expect that he had such a compartmentalized life. You know, and I can tell in talking to his mom, that she, you know, she told me how hard it was for her to take in the fact that she learned her son was gay and that he would have AIDS on the same day. She had no idea. I mean, and she didn't know until he was hospitalized until he had that seizure, you know, to have that kind of a compartmentalized life where you You have so many different, you know, sides of yourself and people, you know, and to be able to hold that sustain that for so many years with his family versus his Wooster group friends, you know, that was surprising to me. I didn't know how hard he worked. On these shows is when he was dying. And what it took to stop being a stand in, you know, because the Wooster group aesthetic was that you stand in for other people who aren't there you can stand in. You know, he stood in for Spalding Gray's mother. He stood in for, yeah, I mean, he started, he developed a whole aesthetic and he spoke of himself and David Savarin's book as this kind of a surrogate for standing. And he said anyone could be there anyone could be standing in it just happens to be me. And he stood in for Spalding Gray's father so well that Spalding thought. You know, here is the breath, the breath, the way his father had breathed, the intonations of that breathing. To go from there to finally standing beside, you know, to standing beside these men who are dying, not standing in for them, but, you know, saying I am one of them. This is me. And, you know, I didn't know I really there's so much I didn't know. And when I started this with I didn't know anything about death. I had never lost anybody. I had never lost somebody close to me and as I wrote it, my parents both died. No, my, my dad died in 2004. My husband died in 2012. You know, there's a lot of loss my daughter was born, which was wonderful. But I didn't really understand I think when I talk to people about losing Ron at that time, what loss meant. You know, I didn't know what how Marianne had felt or how John had felt or how great he felt, or the Wooster Group themselves, how they, you know, the, you know, this real loss of this person that you loved and spent a lifetime with or years with. I didn't understand that. Yeah, Martin, who was for 14 years his partner, you know, and up until his death, who survived, I think, also that crisis. Yeah, it's, it is incredible. Also, you spoke about his early days at Siena College, I think one of his roommates became a archbishop, another one was a two star general. Yeah, in Puerto of Puerto Rico, the other was a two star general and the commander of the New York State Army Corps or whatever something I mean that these were his friends. Yeah, it is incredible. I think Richard Shackner worked, which is really this brilliant work he did with the performance group, and that actually gave birth, you know, to the Wooster Group he actually, which I didn't know that Wooster Group is how he called his place where he bought the shares to own it was called Wooster Group because it was on Wooster, if I understand right and he actually as you point out he handed over the shares and almost like an ancient Greek tragedy in a defeat of the general who had to give it over to the new one and who couldn't see the work next to each other on both sides, complicated and I wish they had found a way to do that also from the Wooster Group. But yeah, that Shackner said, you know, you use life, life materializing he would interview the private lives, sexual lives, emotional lives, but he would never be part of the audience experience it wasn't a play, but never visible in the Wooster Group kind of, you know, turned that around and visible as an enormous change and enormous contribution that came came out of it but now let's talk I really would like to talk and we have both of them here with us and I hope you will forgive us. Teresa, you people really look at the book is a remarkable life and detailed study of an actor of a New York actor stuff we all would love secretly to be. You know, that's was his life and and she researched what he didn't fall so it's just to learn about you know, work with friends, go for what you want stay don't go away go 20 times say, you know, choose a place and be with it but when we now come to that that that phylloctetes a work. Which, as Marion earlier said so beautifully, Ray Cohen Jack Smith was about living with AIDS, and then this was about dying with age of is a virus of is the disease or as our tour would say, was the plague. So how, how did it all. How did that start and how did that came about. Was the original idea. Why did he say that a Greek. He just to also to give you a little scenario sense of place and time. This must have been a 90, probably 92 sometime. And I used to do these street fairs and sell junk on the street. All kinds of things, and he was looking for old lamps and stuff. And so he saw some stuff some junk on my table said, Oh, actually, John, I, you know, this is for Roy Cohen john Jackson, you know, I need this to kind of junk stuff. You know, take it to take it but you know it's just junk anyway. And that, and that that table is when he said you know I would I would really love to work with you and let's talk about a Greek play. I was like, What the fuck, what do you. That was the last thing I would have been interested in doing actually. So anyways, but it started at that table there and then, then it went on and then we, you know he told me about the story and I vaguely remembered it from from college. And then he just said just, I want maybe you want to talk to this tell the story doesn't a few sentences for all audiences. Philoxides. Oh God. Okay, Trojan war. Philoxides is a Greek general. They're going on their way to to actually they've been fighting the war for like 10 years. They can't win. And they need these magic arrows to to win the Trojan war. But meanwhile on their way to the Trojan war 10 years before they left Philoxides behind on an island because he'd been bitten by a snake. And then he was in such. He was such a mess actually that they just abandoned him they left him there, and then he smelled you and smell everything and then they, they can't win after 10 years. The Oracle says, you need these magic arrows and Philoxides has the arrows. Great. So they have to go back and pick up the arrows. So that's basically what happens and then Odysseus brings us who is the son of a of Achilles, I think it's been so long. Anyway, so he brings them there and then there's basically this, this argument, apparently about the arrows but it is really about life and death and all this other other stuff transitioning from one reality to another. So it gets into a lot of other things but it starts with this sort of thorny situation that also has to do with war and killing and death and violence and all that kind of stuff. Right. So that's, that's kind of where, where, where it started. And then and Ron basically said just, you know, you should just write what you want. And then there was this idea to combine it with modern Mueller text and Andre she text and make this kind of experimental version of Philoxides made out of all these different pieces so they wanted me to write the, the American part of it, I guess. I don't know how it started but then the more we worked on it. Ron really, you know, he really liked it the way it was but he was, you know, he had, he was tied up into this. It was Kai theater right. Yeah, Brussels, Kai theater and so they had this whole production with, I think Anna Traser to Kiersmacher was supposed to be doing the dancing Leslie Thornton was supposed to be doing the video. It was this huge crazy thing by with this director young Ritz Ma, but it slowly and brand probably knows much better than me but I mean slowly devolved into a not a reality show but in a way he was actually dying during the, the piece. So that's how how it started but I do think he was kind of conflicted by the way that the apparent show was supposed to go and the way his life was going. And I remember they, I've never told anybody this before they, the Kai theater to send us all this at the beginning they sent a huge box of research materials on Greek plays on this version and that version and all this kind of stuff. And we're seeing they're looking at what you know, Ron didn't care about it. I said what am I going to do with all that when I was supposed to write something he said no no no let's throw it away. So we threw it away. At a garbage can on the corner of 7th Avenue and and bleaker street. So but that was in a way. So Ron in a way I said, yeah, shall we just, he said yeah let's just throw it away. I don't want it. It's like Balthochropius who was teaching architecture in Harvard throw out all the architecture books which he did. I just want to have Bauhaus books on the show. Yes, because he said you know we have we're doing our own just our own flotties we're starting from ground zero we this is what we're doing now so don't. And so in a way that was very to me it was as a playwright it was it was gave me a lot of courage okay, I'm just going to write whatever I want. And that's what he wants he wants the words, he's going to do the acting. And this is to me it's a kind of a very it's a great example of a writer, and an actor, getting together, and then making something together out out of that, rather than some other things that are at work. Incredible, and he was already like actors to be together with writers too much. They don't have because it can be, it can be a little fun, but this was good so I mean, it was, you know, him talking to me me talking to him and me giving the words to him directly to the actor not through anybody else. As people would say today, a non hierarchical relation and, and to know that, you know, if, if I understand right run was already too sick to perform on the sanct as the temptation of sanct Anthony he couldn't finish it I think. I mean, William Defoe took over if I'm right, and for some of the shows, and, and I think Norm Frisch talked about I think the fact that as he said a run what lay in a casket at center stage, and I think he really wants to die on stage during the run of that show I think that would have been his wish, not to die in a hospital not to die in an airplane, but on stage, but you know, as in the place kind of opened it doesn't really man doesn't really know how it ends it was was was open Mary and what you were part of that right and I'll just amend the end by saying two things. I think well and played it after Ron died, when they had a restaging of it somewhere in Europe, I guess. The one thing that I do remember, as long as we're drilling down into the details is that Susan and I had arrived in Bellagio and we were waiting for Ron and break. And there was this whole thing like was Ron too sick to travel. You know, had he actually been rehearsing and the whole thing at Kai was, you know, as john said they had this elaborate, you know, in the support structure, everyone was there, dramaturge blah blah blah, and he hardly ever rehearsed he hardly got on stage, because he was so sick. But that whole question of, you know, I think he was already in this great netherworld. Before he came to Bellagio, like getting on the train with Greg I think was excruciating and that whole journey and then landing in Italy and then leaving again you know was all this these stages of kind of losing consciousness, or letting go. Yeah. In a way, you know what, as you know also Carol Martin talk, you know about the theater of the real you know. So the actual traumatization of death with someone who is dying I think there's a remark from Hannah Miller who said, everybody talks about the liveness and life on stage, you know, which is actually true I think in a theater audience and actors age. It's not a film. You are there, they get older you get older, you know, but Hannah Miller said what's important is that actually the audience member they could die. That's what's important, and you're showing them something and, and, and I think that in a way you know that that that was so present a dramatization of death and the reality of it and not perhaps as, you know, remove from us as in the corona time. In the corona time now did you, did you ever feel. I think there is a quote about Jonathan Teresa, because it's a freak show, you know, a dying performer with age on stage people pay to see him. It's, you know, they supposedly they're legends of German immigrants who went to suicide spar where people would pay seeing them dying drinking themselves to death was poison, but then they would take over the, the, you know, the depth of and save the family but the people had to die in front of their eyes. There is the story, you know, in Italy and Palermo, I think it is still there's the idea of the sin eater like someone dies, and they put a piece of bread on the deceased. And they think all the sins go in and then they pay a poor person to eat the bread and then, you know, it goes with that, you know, in a way you know was it, I had to think of it I don't know what the connections of him in his casket, but what was so wrong in society and he took it on and he put it in. But do you feel there was something uncanny about it or do you if you know that was right this is the way it should have been done. Is that a question for me. First for Marianne and then Teresa. Lord, you mean uncanny about his death. So open. Is that a freakish in a way where I think there was the quote. Oh, good. Well, I mean, I think that when we were touring Europe with Roy Conjack Smith, there was that kind of homophobia that was not in New York. So that whole, I mean a freak shows like, you know, fuck you. That's my feeling about it but do you think that he was used to sort of frame putting frames around his life. So that was just another frame. A frame in a sense of around his dying. If a lot that he's became like a frame around his death. You know what I mean for a frame for him to walk it through to experience it. Yeah, or just to show it to the world. To share it. Yeah. To embody it. Yeah, Teresa what do you think. Well, I'll read you the quotes, you know, that you're referencing here. And voters trusted European collaborate collaborators Ky Cedar and director Yan Ritz, Ritzma honored the way in which the actor chose to present himself on stage. By contrast, the image of a person with late stage aids, speaking from the inside of the coffin, provoked anxiety amongst some of voters American peers. Professor and recall to his discomfort, discomfort with the circumstances under which the show went on and this is john here. Ron got very sick on the second evening he was literally in a kind of delirium and if anybody sees tapes of those performances they're horrifying. This is where I found there was as far as AIDS was concerned, a split between Europe and America. I personally thought that this director and theater were putting on a freak show. And then I say, you know, my, my converse argument I always have to be like the devil's advocate. Conversely, one might argue that Ritzma, Ritzima, and the Ky theater were incredibly brave to present the realities of late stage aids, usually hidden in private rooms and hospices. March 3 1994 premier was brought but there's only full performance of phylloctetes, due to his failing health. Ky theater canceled the last rest of the run. Prior to that time butter had never missed a performance with the Worcester group, or of Ron Roy colon Jax Smith, just ren noted that butter sometimes did readings of phylloctetes in the United States. The readings I heard butter, the readings I heard Ron do were amazing and very quiet. John said, for Ron. It was a quiet time. If he couldn't act it, then at least he could say it. That was really important for him. And so, um, you know, in another section, just briefly Ron was talking with he did an interview with say a Flemish. Frank Vercruz, I can't say his last name. Frank Vercruz and from Stan, a company, a Flemish company called Stan, it was called the dialogue and acting. And near the end of that transcript while discussing an unnamed performance which could have been Roy colon Jax Smith or could have been phylloctetes. He confided Ron confided to Vercruz and that his motive engaging with audiences was changing as a direct result of his AIDS. And this is his quote. I had this extraordinary experience this week for the first time in my life because of my health. I had to cancel two shows. I had respiratory complications. So we decided in the next two in the next performances to turn the whole thing into a kind of documentary. I had to talk to the audience and try to join the audience a couple of times. I'm not sure that what I do now is even theater. It's more social. It's trying to wake people up a bit. As he had done throughout his career, Butter adapted to change. This time, however, the transitions to which he responded were not those of an ensemble or its leaders. The changes were in his body, long known for his readiness to take risks. Butter now faced a profoundly poignant gamble, sharing his daily efforts to live and work with viewers who paid to see theater. So people were saying things to see theater, and he was showing them his life. And so, you know, my thoughts on this are, I guess that it was good for people to see that. I mean, I think it was necessary and powerful and I hope there'll be a time when people can talk about coronavirus that way, openly and what, what it's like to to live with this virus and to have long COVID and to lose people because I think it's still, you know, not, not something that theater wants to represent right now. It's too close to home. Yeah, and it took incredible strength, I think, most like a gladiator or, you know, or a soldier, what he was, you know, to, to share that be there and, and, and be out there it is quite, quite a great testimony, I think also of his generation of theater makers and how to deal with life, how to create meaning, how to convince and share and also help society to deal and think about issues, problems, complications, life threatening, that's our happening and I think this is why theater is so important and we will only know perhaps five, 10 years from what will happen in that moment where we are in a most probably it is as serious, you know, as the AIDS crisis, if not more, so theater has to react will change and we will have to see what it was but I think he really is a model of an engaged theater artist, you know, who in his time, you know, use the means available based on his tradition to invent something and to do something new that touched so many lives became so significant incredible to think, John, that it was only performed once then one evening. Well, from, from what I know, right, yeah, was, well, if you want to call it a performance, it was, what was it once, I guess, it was like a run through you think or, no, no, I mean it was just live that you don't, it's not even doesn't even go in, in that category. What do you mean, which is what we're talking about. He, you know, the theater and whatever happened happened and, and that's what it was, I mean, yeah. But anyway, yeah, I, I, yeah, I was, I think that was it, that was it. They were done, you know, in a way he made it to kind of to the finish line. Apparently, and in a certain way, but you know, in a way it was not he, you know, he know, whatever we thought he said he said it may not be for me to say these were, you know, you know, they, whatever, like a Moses shows the promise that I'm not I may not be able to enter. I mean, in a way he, he, he wasn't able so they had to be, you know, pushed forward to the next thing you know that was his part in it his part of it in it actually was not being the acting actor, the present actor, I mean, he was the delivery mechanisms to for the words to get to another actor. So that's kind of a very in a way a very interesting generous type of it, and that saying, you know, you're going to have to take this script because I, you know, it's mine, but I can't do it. So. But that's kind of how I see it he just made it to the finish line and so. Well you both made it I think there's another, you know, years ago you, john I don't think you, you may not remember this but in 2002 you did a symposium with me at NYU. We spoke. That's where I first met you as you and Richard and Karen Finley. And you said that he asked you tentatively asked water if making phylloctetes would be too much for him. He said, Ron was walking around very gingerly. He was turning into a wisp. I got very nervous and worried I said to him, Are you going to be able to finish this thing. He said you know, we may not be able to finish this thing. This may be you walking me to the gate here. And I think to him. And I think he you know to him it didn't matter in a way if he finished it or not the fact that he had someone to walk into the gate was important to the fact that he had a role to play, you know, kept him alive. Mary and interrupted you you had. I would just that I think the reports of that that perform that final performance were, you know, that it was labored. He was having trouble breathing. I don't think he made it through the whole script. I think it was kind of a half representation of the actual text. Yeah. But I, you know, I also have to say just. You know, I was not at that performance, but I was in Europe during a lot of that time of that very bad age time. And you know, to Europe at that point, at least as a gay guy there. I felt that we were American gaze, whatever were a freak show for Europe. It was like, Oh, you know, that's not that's not going to happen here you just guys, you guys, you know, couldn't control your whatever, you know, all that kind of stuff it was very, it was pretty brutal and that's why I reacted so much against that performance. I just, you know, they're just, um, they're not looking at him as them. They're looking at him as the other than the Americans or whatever, or the gaze or whatever. It's them they're looking at they're not looking at him as you know, a fellow human being. And that's kind of what was part of, you know, it was part of that idea of the play was part of a lot of what was going on with in theater and AIDS and all that kind of stuff. There was that split at that point and it was, it was, it was creating very creepy, I thought. And people would kind of treat you in this way. Well, you know, you're one of them or we feel so sorry for you, or we want to help you and all this. It was, it was pretty weird, I have to say, so I don't know. I thought I'd throw that in. You know, they just needed him, like the doctors to win the war to make theater, right? Yeah, to a theater play. What, you know, what, uh, when meanwhile, people were actually really, you know, really dying. Yeah, what do you do? What does art mean really in the face of someone dying and if he's someone is dying in stage on stage in front of you and that's incredible. Also incredible that the story, you know, in a way that theater perhaps was that island for Ron, you know, where he went away from life. You know, he said, I'm not going to join the wars of life. You know, he had been shot anyway and he was suffering, but the theater was his island and then the world comes back to him and says, you know, we want to see you, you know, and so it's just so many layers to that, to that story of, I think Jack Smith had a show called Rented Island. I think it was the theme of the Whitney exhibition, the kind of theater. It's an interesting idea of a rented island. It's not your island. You're on an island and it's your rented. It's not yours. And what do you do? Do you engage? Do you not? This Hamlet question in a way what he was asking me. So many layers to it and so many truths to it and so I really want to thank you all for, you know, giving us a little bit more of an idea of that time and it's really worth reading the history and the story of Ron and it's so connected to the Worcester group, Richard's work, the performance group to New York City and to theater in general, how theater morphed, you know, how it changed, you know, from repertoire written plays by British playwrights, you know, to the classics to something contemporary, this incredible work of that company. And so really thank you Teresa for spending so much time with it. So much is written at the moment also in academia and I'm all for it about theory. It's important, you know, and at the long time it was not at the forefront but now I think the stories of the performers, the directors, the places, the companies are missing and they need to be recorded so we understand better where we come from and because at the time they helped us to deal with the moment but also with the future. And that was coming. So really thank you all and we could stay much, much longer. I don't know Teresa do still have something for us to read or you, you already read the part you had prepared right. I don't know. I think, maybe. Maybe some of his words if there is something. Well there's this very moving, moving section by, you know, there's two sections. Well let's take one and as a final word and listen to you. Yeah. Okay, so this is. I'll read the facts from Mary. Okay, so the Wooster groups archives include condolences sent to the company after Potter's death. Among the cards and letters there one message stood out. It was a fax for Marianne Weems, still in Bellagio writing to express her grief that Potter's passing and to recount his final days there and to recount his final days. In her fax Weems recalled how urgently Potter had wanted to go home. Slipping between clarity and dementia. He said calmly, I think it might be time to retire. At the hospital in Milan as medical staff prepared him to board the plane for New York. Weems whispered Ronnie and stroke to his forehead. Butter briefly opened his eyes. I last on the tarmac he finally seemed relieved. Moving all along how Potter story ends there's little comfort and closure and reflecting on what I have learned about Potter in the year since I first began this project. I would say, ironically, that some of my own claims about Potter are the ones he might reject. He would provide strong evidence throughout this book for Potter's role as an unsung hero of both the performance group and the Wooster group. He would surely resist taking credit away from his collaborators particularly Schechner and Lecomte. Potter would not call himself a shadow governor, but even though he played an influential administrative role in both companies, instead of seeking to stand out. I suspect Potter would take the greatest pride in being known as a team player, someone who did his part and who wore his multiple hats very well. I really, really thank you and that's a good conclusion. And I remember also that one line you quoted that he used to say to his girlfriend and boyfriend's honey longevity is not in the cards. And that's how it is that was in his life, but that's also theater, you know, it's the disappears, you know, and so really thank you all for joining for taking the time to raise up our writing. And John, for being such good friends to him, being part of his creative work, helping him also to be there present on stage. And thanks for us for howl round, Thea and Vijay for putting up with us for so many months now and to host our book series, which I think is important to listen to what people wrote and thought about in this time of corona. We're going to have actually Alexis Green on Wednesday and she will talk to Emily Mann. The remarkable story of Emily Mann is a woman that had to find her way through the American theater system and been running for 30 years, the micarta in Princeton, but all the complications. I was not aware of it and it's also an incredibly meticulous research and record of her work and life. I can't wait to do that. But really, thank you and thank you for our audience. It means a lot for us that you listen. There's so much out there when we started our seagull talks, there were not so many conversations now is an abundance of it. I think it's great, but I think also we show our respect to writers of books and who put these things together and we learn something also about us and maybe there's something inside inside it that could change our lives as it was for these artists who read and who put these things together. I think it's important and we have to take it and transform it and we can do the very same. So, John, Mary and a tourist, thank you so much. Thanks to my secret team. Thank you. Cactus Juice, Tanvi and me and see you all soon. And what time is it in San Francisco now? Well, it's time to teach. Time to teach. Okay, okay. Bye-bye. Thank you all. Bye-bye.