 You see the data center, the Graduate Center, CUNY, MetaMineHat, and sorry about the delay as always with technology, it's also not unfailable as we humans are. And so we fixed it. See, I did great fast work at how around them we are thankful for them to host us. It's a colder day today here in Manhattan. It's always with technology. Moisture, almost like, not as we said, unfailable weather where you don't know if it's going to rain for the next couple of days, or maybe it will clear up in the afternoon and we will have sunshine. All of it looks a little bit better. President Biden's work to get the vaccinations done so fast is totally impressive. And there are announcements that perhaps July 4. Lots of restrictions will be lifted here in the city of New York. What it really means for performing arts, for opening, we do not know. Mostly those cannot operate at 20, 30, or 50% levels. And we still have to think clearly and deeply about what to do. Also, what did we learn from this? What did this time of corona provoke as an existential and serious engagement with the meaning of why we do that? And because we were not able to do it right now and now we are, artists have been always on the right side of history on that complex struggle for democracy and for freedom and for rights and they are the ones I think we have to listen to and it's of utmost importance. Today with us, we have one of those artists who make New York, is Chris Myers. Chris, thanks for being with us. Thank you for having me. Happy to be here. Yeah, thank you. I'm sorry for that little delay. Let me tell you all a little bit about Chris and besides his work for anti-capitalism, for artists, what he is spearheading. He is a New York born and based theater artist. He works primarily as an actor and he trained in Juilliard, the great Juilliard School, and attended the British American Drama Academy and he went to the legendary La Guardia High School for the performing arts, the Harlem School for the Arts and other places that contributed to his making of an artist as a young artist. He's a writer, director, producer and teaching artist. It's quite impressive what he has done on screen. He has appeared in Spike Lee's, she's got a habit, the resident in Fox, Sneaky Pete on Amazon, The Breaks, VH1 and The Good Fight on CBS and the upcoming Mary Happy, whatever was Dennis Quaid, also a Netflix production. So in theater, he has worked primarily in new plays that lead in cultural institutions like Soho, Rap and Others and he won an Obie Award for his performance in Brendan Jacob Jenkins and Octurune and he went on to perform in the critically-appraised world inside a loop. And of course we are big fans of Brendan Jacob Jenkins. Actually the very first reading of the Octurune was done at the Segal, Mark Ravenhill and Brendan Matt at the Segal and we feel close, especially also to that quarter and of course to Soho, Rap and Sara Benson, the great Sara who also was a pre-recurator, Chris. Where are you now? From the background, we cannot really see where you are so where are you at the moment? Yeah, I'm hiding out on the upper west side of Manhattan, New York City. Oh, good. So how has that time of Corona been for you and your work? That's, well, what a way to start. I mean, you know, there's been a lot of waves of emotions, stifled creativity, abundance of overflowing ideas and everything in between. I mean, where I am right now is actually I feel like I really have a clear game plan for how I want to spend this time while the world is kind of off its center. But I wasn't always this way. I mean, when I started, I came into the pandemic. I remember the first thing all my actor friends around my age were just so antsy. They were trying to start little clubs to read plays together or take monologues and put them on Instagram. And I kind of instantly was like, you know, guys I think we're gonna be here for a long time. I think it's gonna get harder and I was trying to counsel at least my personal friends rather than try to be like super productive, maybe just take a breath, maybe just like see what's actually going on in the world. This is, you know, early pandemic. And then I kind of giving myself that permission eventually found myself into certain rhythms that I felt like weren't going to add to the stress and burden of being alive during this really tumultuous time. But that also wasn't me just kind of sitting on my ass despairing, because I was lucky to have a certain amount of privilege. You know, I'm in my mom's apartment right now where I get whenever times get hard, if I, you know, I don't ever have to worry about not having a roof above my head in New York city, which is nice. So it's like, well, I'm here, I'm safe. I'm collecting unemployment. What can I do? Right? And that's how I found myself to the work that I'm currently doing primarily around teaching but there's some other stuff going on too. What do you teach? I teach class politics to artists through this organization I've created called Anti-Capitalism for Artists. I devised a eight week curriculum. Just, I wanna be clear, I had no previous experience doing this before the pandemic, but I saw an opportunity and I took it and I just kind of assembled all the stuff that I'd read through self-study through the years and put it into an eight week curriculum and I just put something out on Instagram. I said, hey, anybody wanna learn about class politics and capitalism with me? About 40 people said yes. I kind of divided them into four groups of 10, Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday and just learned as I went teaching these ideas to folks and I've done it, this is now the fourth, I'm starting the fourth cycle of working with people on next Monday. By the end of it, we will have taught roughly 200 artists of various stripes, the basics of class politics. That's quite impressive. As you know, we are based at the university so you created a way of learning, of transferring knowledge and of studying. How did you get that idea? Well, when the pandemic started, obviously, I think every American, well, speaking just for America, we all kind of, the relationship to the state shifted. There's this virus raging through decimating lives, killing people, making them sick, destabilizing their incomes, business sectors shut down, despair, et cetera, et cetera, right? Simultaneous to that, the streets are coming alive, people are coming alive in protest, there's uprisings everywhere. And I remember I started marching as part of the Black Lives Matter movement when Trayvon was first murdered and I did it for many years thereafter and kind of came to this moment, I think certain people get to at a certain age where they realize there's a certain limitation on protest, not to say that it's ineffective or shouldn't be done, but that in and of itself, the action doesn't get you, what you want, raising awareness in and of itself doesn't get you the goal. Plus, with the pandemic kind of flaring, me staying at my mom's place, her being of a certain age with underlying conditions, not wanting to go out into the street, catch something and bring it back, I had a couple of reasons where I was like, I might not be a part of this moment in the streets, but how can I still be useful? How can I still contribute to what's going on? And it kind of hit me that specifically as an actor in the theater and film and TV industries, there's a lot of discussion about racism, sexism, gender equality, even ableism, people are talking about accessibility. And it kind of hit me that even though most of those folks who are talking about these things might even call themselves intersectionalists, that class politics, the kind of intentional study of our position, not just as identities of what skin color we have or what gender we identify as, but that uniting all of those is a certain class reality. I realized like nobody's talking about that. And it's quite important, right? We see that you can elect people who represent your race, but they might not actually meaningfully address your real material conditions as a member of a larger class of people. And so I said, well, this is an opportunity. Basically I said to people, if you care about race, if you care about heteropatriarchy, et cetera, you should also care about class politics. And I'm gonna show you why. So just come over here. And it was kind of just realizing there was this big opening. So tell us, class politics, what comes to your mind? Yeah, I mean, I like to say it's as simple as an analysis for determining who has what and why in political and economic terms, right? So I work for a wage, right? But most working people who work for a wage after they pay for all their expenses, their rent, their medicine, their food, they're not gonna be able to save whatever they have left and buy Amazon, right? There's an order of magnitude difference between the capitalist class, the business learning class and the working class of the proletariat if you wanna get old school about it, right? And so it's about making people aware of these class distinctions. Elon Musk didn't just roll over and start SpaceX or Tesla. He actually didn't even, people don't even know he didn't find Tesla at all actually. He was at first an employee who wiggled his way into leadership. But even like SpaceX, he got to start in business because his parents owned an Emerald Mine, I believe it was in South Africa. What are white people are doing owning Emerald Mines in South Africa? They get to deal with colonialism. So there's this legacy of class relations that makes it so that Elon Musk or Jeff Bezos started Amazon with a $300, $300,000 loan from friends. I don't know about you, I don't have the friends you could just loan me $300,000. There are certain economic classes that we belong to. Most of us aren't even aware that we're a part of them because there's this myth in this country that anybody who works hard enough can be Jeff Bezos. Well, Jeff Bezos didn't have to work hard to be Jeff Bezos. Elon Musk didn't have to, they were born into these kind of classes. And although you can change it, it's incredibly difficult to do so. So I start by saying to people to explain class politics, my first question is, can you define capitalism? And 95% of the people who show up to this class cannot define the system that dominates our lives. So of course there's a big problem there, teaching class politics when people don't even understand the economic system we live in. And the people who come to you, are they mostly artists, like of the theater world, performance world or? I mean, they're all artists. I don't police that too deeply. I tell people it doesn't matter if you make a lot of money, it doesn't matter if you're famous, it doesn't even matter if you're good. If you identify as an artist, you can be here. But I do allow people to self, some people say, oh, well, I haven't really done anything in 10 years. And it's like, well, I don't know how to make that determination. You tell me, are you an artist? And you can come if not. So I let people sort that out. I would say, demographically, it's probably mostly people in the theater, TV and film industry, because it kind of started with my network and it's a lot of word of mouth. But as it's grown, that's really shifting. And I don't really know what the exact breakdown. I can tell you we've had DJs, we've had dance makers, we've had designers, we've had writers, we've had creative producers, we've had stage managers, we've had actors, and we've had of course multi-hyphenates, people who do multiple things. So we try not to make it too prescriptive because we wanna speak to everybody, but yeah, everybody's welcome. And then they pay like in a workshop, like for an acting workshop or like for directing workshop, they participate in this. I think it is stunning at a time where often actors, you know, get out the guitar, they sing and make a comedy game and online and to have the flag of the shop out, I'm still here, you said, let's do an academy, basically eight weeks. Let's think about the system, we live in the capitalist system, how it affects the art. It's a radical move, a move that comes out of corona and corona time. Had you always that idea or do you think it was connected to this moment? I did always have the idea, but this moment made it like there was no going back. You know, it was like, it was an idea that became quite urgent once we entered into these conditions. And I will say like, I had to change internally before deciding to offer this to other people. Like I had to look myself in the mirror and ask myself how serious I take this work of centering capitalism and, you know, embracing class politics and putting that into my analysis. You know, I remember when again, going back to Trayvon Martin's murder and the emergence of Black Lives Matter, I remember being one of a small group of people in my kind of Facebook network. This is when Facebook was much more popularly used, talking about race, specifically in the theater. I remember calling out, you know, certain theaters for having all white seasons and connecting that to police violence. And I remember feeling really afraid for myself, my career, how's this gonna look? I remember I once called out a certain theater that I won't name. And I got an email from the artistic director asking me to meet to talk about my critique of them. This is like seven years ago. And I've actually, off of that kind of just prostitizing almost about race in America and specifically in the theater, I got a number of artistic directors, you know, kind of wanted to talk. And I remember feeling, well, is this good? Does this mean, is it bad? Am I gonna be, you know, kind of cast out? Now, what's really interesting is, fast forwarding to now, it's almost too normalized to talk about race, you know. Earlier last year, when the pen, you know, every theater is putting out a statement. Oh, you know, we see you black lives matter, and I remember most of my black friends in the theater were like, this is not what we want. We don't need some nonprofit issuing a blanket statement on Instagram telling us they see us. That's like not what, you know, if anything, just do some work and show us, do you know what I mean? My point is that I felt like afraid, however many years ago, talking publicly about race, and it clearly, you know, the culture has shifted. My hope is that in doing this, talking about class politics and capitalism, while I'm like a little afraid now, the moment kind of revealed to me that this is actually like deeply necessary to be talking about, and I have a hunch that in a couple of years, we'll be looking back and like all theater institutions will be way more intentionally engaging with how capitalism courses through their institutional veins. Like hopefully they don't let Bank of America underwrite their season or, you know, a dream of a day where a Koch brother doesn't get to have naming rights at an arts institution, for instance. These are kind of obvious things, but it's beyond even that. I think there's other questions. You know, like the Flea Theater made a lot of news a few months back because of their kind of constant exploitation of their resident company. And, you know, this is under the leadership of somebody who ostensibly comes from oppressed backgrounds. Like this is kind of another reason I'm deeply invested in class politics. We don't just throw black people, you know, queer people, whatever, women into oppressive systems and expect them to change. We actually have to deal with the system. Identity is not like a special spice. We just sprinkle on top of oppressive systems to make them suddenly function egalitarian in an egalitarian way. So, yeah, I'm kind of rambling, but I do think that to answer your question, this moment was really important for, yes, this idea, but also for me saying there's no going back. Class politics is absolutely necessary going forward. No, I think it is remarkable what you're doing and also so much in America, the emphasis on the individual, you know, do yoga, do meditation, go to the gym, you know, better business plan, create an app and then you're going to be successful as an artist and often artists even are hold up as models for, you know, the people who are unemployed who have to juggle five jobs and then one day you get the Oscar and it's a big lie in a sense. And it's a system, I mean, we are all in it. So what you point towards to say, well, it's all about the individual, but we're also there is something we move in this. Isabel Wilkinson said, you know, the house we live in is 300 years old and the structure of the building, you know, has raised a structure where the windows are, where the doors are, where you look out. A lot of it has been decided and you point towards it. So what did you, what do you study? What did, what do you, what do you read? You, I guess it's based on books or your improvisations or open talks. How does that, how does a session in your academy, how does it look like? Yeah, and also I just want to say real quick, because I'm not sure it is free. Everything that I do is donation based. So I don't charge people and it's, you know, I don't pressure people I ask once in the beginning and then I ask once at the end and it is what it is. But I will say that people have been very generous. You know, if, if, if nobody donated, I probably couldn't justify spending this amount of hours every week when, you know, I might have to figure out another way to be productive with my time. But yeah, people come through. So that's good. What do I read? I mean, that's, that's the thing. I'm, I'm a little weird. And I think that anybody who is an organizer or an educator, just like an artist, you know, if you get into these fields, you're a little weird and it's unfair to expect that other people are going to have the same proclivities as you. So I'm always trying to keep these, these weekly sessions or units as I call them engaging. It's a mix of if I can find a YouTube lecture or if I can find a podcast or if I can find a short article, something in really plain language, I try to use as much of that stuff as possible. There are some moments in the curriculum where that's really hard and I have to just assign chapters of books. I love books. This is my, this is what I'm trying to say. If I had my way, we just would read books endlessly for the eight weeks. What books do you assign? Well, one really kind of inspiring text we read from is called Inventing the Future by Alex Williams and Nick Cernasek. And it's a proposal for a post-capitalist vision written very much with the now in mind, right? So you can read Marx all day, but and he's still holds up, right? But there's a lot of things he couldn't have seen coming like automation, for instance. So in Inventing the Future, instead of the kind of classic Marxist proposal of full employment, they suggest that with automation, we might be able to demand full unemployment because we can automate the vast majority of labor. Okay, but in and of itself, this might sound like a hellscape. So of course, there's more things that have to go into this proposal. There's UBI, right? Universal Basic Income, which reading this text, you'll learn up into the past few decades actually had bipartisan support. It actually wasn't a liberal thing or even a left thing. Now it's interesting UBI because most Americans associated with Andrew Yang was a very fixed kind of capitalist version of it. Hey, I'm in an industry that's gonna destroy your job. Here's a little pittance so you like don't starve to death. Not exactly the UBI that we're talking about in a post-capitalist proposal which would essentially be looking at extracting the surplus value that the automated labor creates and dispersing it equally to people so that they can live fulfilling lives. There's another part of the proposal, diminishment of the work ethic. This goes into something that you were just saying. Part of the drudgery of capitalism is this kind of internal competition, both with yourself and with others. For who, right? You produce all this value, you're driving yourself mad to ultimately give most of the value you produce away. So there's this kind of, and of course maybe you can bring it all the way back to Protestantism if you want, but there's this deeply enmeshed work ethic which is very toxic and self-defeating that we actually have to ideologically dismantle so that people even feel comfortable accepting UBI. So they even feel comfortable giving drudgery, kind of banal work away. Now, of course, if people wanna do that work, some people really just like cranking a wheel all day, eight hours. It helps them focus and do it, right? But the idea is that in this post-work future, we can automate things the way that people don't want. And you know, diminishing the work week also proposals that have been around for a long time, a four-day work week. I think a lot of us, especially during the pandemic who have been privileged enough to not have to do kind of constant work, have probably been working with a lesson being like, you know what? I can get the same amount of stuff done with far less time. We all kind of know this, right? So maybe we have to rethink a lot of those things. So anyway, it's a fascinating text. It starts with the critique of what the writers call folk politics, which is a lot of like Occupy they were writing directly against, but I would also submit Black Lives Matter. Folk politics as they write about it is kind of, you know, mobilization, street protests, spectacle, stuff that really feels good and does have importance, but without sustained, durable, organized, strategic, you know, planning, will ultimately, you know, just be in this cycle. Marches and protests don't renew their own energy. People's feet eventually get tired and they go home, right? So you'd need this kind of more intentional, sometimes hierarchical, you know, these days a lot of young people are afraid of hierarchy. So, you know, it's very decentralized, non-hierarchical. Everything's kind of like in its own little orbit. And the writers kind of suggest that we're never gonna get, we're never gonna build power like that. Capitalism is quite powerful. We need to be a little more intentional. So it starts with that critique, then there's the proposal. And the part that I really love talking to artists about is this idea of kind of resurrecting utopian thinking. And I think this is something that artists, there's a lot of moments in this curriculum where I like to pull out things that I think artists have perhaps more facility with than your average person. I think, you know, as artists, obviously the imagination is really our stomping grounds. And utopian thinking is kind of a critical skill if you're gonna commit to transforming the world, particularly capitalism. There's a quote attributed to both Frederick James and Slavoj Zizek, that it's easier to imagine the end of the world than it is the end of capitalism, right? And that's kind of sad that that's true. That we could imagine a comet hitting the planet Earth easier than we can people getting together and being like, this exploitative system sucks. Let's change it. So I think that this is where utopian thinking comes in. We kind of have to reawaken these deeply seated desires. Slavoj Zizek says, you know, our dreams are not, they don't happen to us. We're actually responsible for our dreams. And that works in the kind of restaging of our desires. And so for me, that's where study itself comes in. That's where this whole curriculum comes in. In order to change your desires, which is where you're responsible for your dreams, you have to put information into your head and think critically about it. That's never gonna happen by itself in this system. The entire ideology of capitalism wants you to just sit back, go to your job, despair, get a check, come home, don't think about it. Blues in charge, reds in charge. Blues in charge, reds in charge. And just round and round we go, nothing will ever change, right? So that's, you know, and I think that artists taking this information have two opportunities. One, artists are people. They're workers just like everybody else. So hopefully they can attach themselves to larger working class struggles. But of course, with these ideas in their head, with utopian thinking revitalized, they can create a new kind of art that actually unsettles people, not in the kind of quaint way where they can sit in their seat and like be confused by something on stage and think that that's good, that they're confused. They must be too stupid to, like, no, like really, like get in there, speak people's language, awaken their desire to change the world. It doesn't have to be agitation propaganda. It just has to show the world as it really is. You know, that's a show a world that's actually, that has class relations, you know, that matter and that have impact in our lives. So, yeah. And you feel that news thinking will also produce your art. So it's a polemic question. What's wrong with the art we have now? I mean, that's such a, I don't want to give myself in trouble. I don't want to make this personal. If I was going to apply a kind of dialectical materialist analysis of what I think is, you know, bad about art, I'm going to speak specifically about theater just so I can be specific here. We worry a little bit too much about the content of the art on stage. This would be my first response, right? It costs $1.5 billion to run for president, not to win, just to run, right? You got to be the kind of person who has access to that kind of money. You can be God's gift to politics. If you don't know the kind of people who are going to give you $1.5 billion, you're never going to have a chance, right, to be in president. There are similar class distinctions on who shows up on those stages, right? We know that going to certain institutions, I mean, for me as a Juilliard, a lot of people ask me questions about how do you get an agent. I don't know what to tell them because I've never had to try. They come to me at Juilliard, you know? But this is like a normal question that like any actor, like 90% of actors struggle with, how do I get an agent? Because the institution I attended, I don't even have to worry about it, right? So there are playwrights, directors, actors, there's an immense amount of class privilege institutionalized before we even see the content of that work. Of course, it's the question of who selects the work that's on stage, their class dimensions here. I know for a fact, two black plays that I've done at white led institutions got in there almost by flukes. In both cases, two different theaters, a black woman either intern or low level position happened to read the script and like really pitch their bosses on it. And to make that, when I learned that about the plays, both of these plays that I've been in, it made perfect sense because knowing the leadership of these theaters, there's no way that those older white people of a certain generation were gonna read these plays and understand it, you know? Like the young black woman could. But these were, again, either low paid or unpaid internship, kind of precarious positions. They're not even the real, they don't represent the institution. That's why I consider it a fluke. So even, again, there's so many class dimensions and to determining kind of what stories get told. Okay, we're not even talking about the work yet. Who's in the theater? How much did it cost? We'd love to talk about ticket prices, right? But I've done plays written by, I will name this one, Brandon Jacob Jenkins, I did war, his war after an actor room, we did it at Lincoln Center. Those tickets are very cheap. There's a moment at the end of the play where my character was supposed to be at a zoo and I take pictures of the zoo animals, which really, I look at the fourth wall, it's the audience. Now, I have a real phone in this play, so I decided every night, I'm gonna take a real picture of the audience. I had this perfect opportunity. But I did that so that I could review the data after the run. And I flipped through all the pictures of every performance and I saw what is probably about 15 to 20% people of color, you know, roughly 80% white people. And this is at a theater with a black play, majority black cast, a black director and very affordable tickets. So this tells you that pricing is not the answer, right? Because it also assumes that people of color are poor, that they can't afford or wanna splurge on a ticket of a certain price, right? And it also releases the institution of responsibility that it's not just about number on a ticket, it's about who are you messaging? How are you talking to people? Do they see themselves represented in the institution? It's about when they do come in, what kind of behavioral norms are they expected to adhere to? Dominique Marceau made a really big deal about this at her play, a skeleton crew when it was getting all these great reviews and all these people were coming, black people were having like natural reactions that black people have to like black people on stage. And white audience members were like, this is not how we behave in the theater, you know? That's classism, right? It's not about charging $20 for a ticket. It's about, okay, fine. Now that they're in the building and you still treat them like outsiders. But even more than this before we talk about the content of the art, I refuse to believe that the creative team is the consummate labor involved in producing a play. You can't tell me that the play functions without the janitorial staff. You can't tell me that the play functions without the porters. You can't tell me that the play functions without security. This is all labor that is essential for the production of that play in that building. And yet there's these hierarchies that express themselves in pay, in status, in relational, you know, interpersonal relations that kind of make it seem as though some people are more involved in the production of the play and other people are just appendages. They're just after thoughts. They're not really important here, right? So all of this is contributing to a lack of class consciousness in a given theater. But of course, when we now get to the content of the play, there's all kind of interesting things that happen. I'm of the opinion that to have a truly egalitarian class conscious art, that art needs to be tethered to an actual community, a movement, to people, right? It's not like just reportage all the time where you go like talk to some poor people and then do a thing on stage where all the actors are kind of middle class, the audience is middle class or upper class, you know, all this kind of stuff. And you're just kind of like copying, pasting and translating institution. I dream of a day where the people we want to represent in our stories actually take part in the creation and production of those, of their own stories. That would be quite lovely, right? It means that institutions would have to actually talk to communities, you know? And not claim to speak for them through like fancy word mission statements. They'd actually have to be a way that, you know, the community can actually talk to an artistic director and be represented, not the board of people who sit, you know, run companies or whatever and kind of advise on decisions, right? And then I think we might be a little more critical about the subject matter of certain work and what it really says. I mean, Hamilton would be an example of a show that people react to seeing all this diversity on stage, right? But you can read about people who have been in the actual company of the show and they have all kind of critiques about the hierarchy within the company. Add to all the things I've just said about all this kind of other kind of class-based way of analyzing institutional theater. But I mean, you know, we also have to ask ourselves, well, this play, you know, Obama loved it, so did Dick Cheney and those, what does that mean when these kind of supposedly polar opposites can come together and say, this is the American story we both agree on? I think there's a level of analysis where we get kind of bamboozled by brown faces in high places, women in high places, et cetera, whatever. And I think we can also be a little more critical about, you know, whose stories are being empowered, whose stories are being protected and embedded. And that's a long road, that's a long road, but those are some thoughts. I don't know, these are all, yeah, a very, very question. What does representation really mean? What does the setting of that body mean? What does it stand for? And Hamilton itself, the way it's produced and the money it makes is that it's supporting that system. There's the Folk School in Berlin, for example, where one director, Rainey Polish, was, you know, he says, how come that we write plays, he criticizes the system? By the way, we produce it with the director in charge, telling who is actor says what, they have no say in it. The way it is produced, the economical model and the artistic model, you know, it's a bit open contradiction. He tries to solve it and saying, I put up material and actor then chooses it, co-writes it, there's no main role. Of course, they are subsidized, so it's a different thing. But yeah, why is Hamilton not maybe in Brooklyn College, which has a 2000 seat state that's often empty and they just do it for kids? So high school people cannot pay the $100, $200, $300, $400 tickets, you know what? And it's a great play, it's a great vision he had. But yeah, so, but it, as you say, you know, this time does make us question deeper. Perhaps also you quoted Shizek who said, you know, we criticize capitalism, but let's also be honest on the left side. What should it be replaced with? Or is it more of a modification? Because there is, nobody has found at the moment something that perhaps works better, but the way it's working is not working for everyone well and something is deeply wrong. So my question to you, that what you always said, the exploitation of labor, the estrangement from your work, you're no longer connected to your work, your communities, would you say in a Broadway play, let's say, A Lion King? Is it also part of a, is it factory work? Do you see parallels when it comes to politics and art? So, sorry, there's a couple of things. I want to make sure I get the question. What about that production model, you know, theaters, you know, do you see that as like a Lion King? I know that I think the original actor played Simba Kild himself. Oh, wow. I didn't know that. And for what we don't know exactly, of course, money factors part into it, you know, but you know. Yeah, no, I, yeah, no. So there's a campaign happening right now with the Actors Equity Association, our theater union for actors and stage managers, that there's a push right now to eliminate the 10 out of 12 rehearsal days, which is what we do from off-Broadway on to Broadway. There's this period of time in tech and previews where you're working these 12-hour days. And of course the crew, the production people are working even longer. And nobody likes it, you know. It only benefits, I guess, people who are spending money on the production, but that's a couple of people. The vast majority of people who have to do their work hate it. And so one of the campaigns that started during the pandemic were people kind of sitting around taking stock of their working lives and saying, how can we change it? One concrete thing we can put some muscle towards is trying to eradicate the 10 out of 12. You know, it's also like most unions, one of the things that they got about 100 years ago was two days off, you know. AEA is one of the few unions that we have these six-day work weeks where we only get a paltry Monday off. I think there are a lot of conditions in our working lives that in the theater, that yeah, they have a kind of factory like spirit to them. I do want to say I don't think that overall, something you said earlier, like actors having a say, you know, getting the co-write, that doesn't necessarily have to be. I mean, I might not want to write a word. Maybe I just want to show up and say somebody else's words and be done with it. Like I don't have to feel like an owner, to feel ownership, let's say, as a socialist, you know, whatever to say, collective ownership of the means of production. So this play, we all collectivize, we all feel that we own this. It doesn't have to mean unnecessary. I mean, I think, you know, it just means that my opinion, my labor is properly evaluated and compensated and that I have a kind of democratic say, but that doesn't necessarily have to be in the authorship of words. So I think likewise, the system right now, it's not necessarily about the roles of any individual person, but how little of a say they have in their own working lives. I think that there's many ways and new models we could look at. I think, you know, kind of how you broadly kind of opened this question about, we know this isn't working, well, you know, what do we replace it with? I think people often get stuck on that because it's like, well, if we don't have the answer right now, we might as well just keep on going how we're going. You know, part of change is failure, part of growth is failure, right? You have to try something, see what works and go back to the drawing board and try again. I think of China would be an example, for instance, if we don't know what you're, they actually have made a number of innovations in, you know, post now to say, how are we gonna get to this post capitalist vision? And they're doing this really weird thing with capitalism right now. They call it socialism with Chinese characteristics, where they're doing things in a different way. Now, we'll see, this is an experiment. You know, they're very clear, we may fail here, this may be a disaster, but that's what they're working with. And of course you have Cuba, you have Vietnam, you have countries that are trying things to, you know, they haven't rid themselves of this system, but they are trying. And I think that in our industry, that's the most important thing is we kind of start from a premise, the theoretical premise that workers ought to have a real democratic say in their working lives. And then the thing is you talk to the workers, you know, you ask them, hey, what's going on with you? Like, how's it been? When have you felt beat down, exploited, taken advantage of? When have you felt alienated from your work? When have you felt like you just wanna throw the towel in? Why have you felt that? What could we do to change that? One really important thing, for instance, here's a dream goal, like what a theater, I wish a theater would do. Theaters spend a lot of money into the equity league, which manages our health insurance. And the way health insurance works in our union is it's basically a Ponzi scheme. You have to work a certain amount of weeks in order to qualify, you may not qualify, but even still your employer paid into the plan, but now somebody else essentially gets that money. It's ridiculous. Theaters should recognize if they serve the interests of the workers who make up the majority of their labor force, that single payer healthcare is like, that's a concern of theirs because then they could take that same money that they spent into this Ponzi scheme of a health plan, give it directly to the actors or stage managers because this is the union they represent. And now, I'm walking away every week with an extra $1,000 in my pocket. That's an extra maybe $4,000 a month. The theater hasn't even had to change its budget, but because we have single payer healthcare, now I as a laborer am vastly more compensated for my labor and I'm not gonna feel as dejected and exploited because I'm actually taking home more of the value that I produce. So this is a way of talking to workers and saying, what's going on in your life? Oh, you're depressed because you don't have health insurance? How can I help? Oh, I know. I can align this institution with a national quest for single payer healthcare and get some more money into your pocket. So it's just a way of thinking and talking to people about what are their needs and how can we help rather than being in these silos all the time. So as a question, we know that leadership is changing at New York Theatre Workshop, a great institution, the closest institution perhaps in the way we have to something like the Royal Court in London, thinking that the public in a way is kind of a state theater. But let's say you would be in charge, someone would pick you, what would you do? What would you do differently? What would be your first things you would do? Your discussions of your academy also and for circles which you did now, what would you do? Wow, Frank, that's a question. I mean, I have no goals of running an institution for the foreseeable future, but I do think one of the first things I would do is take our finances and make them 100% transparent. I think it's important that people see how money comes in and how it gets spent. Speaking of New York Theatre Workshop, I was told that when they did Red Speedo a few years back it costs a lot of money to build a Olympic-sized swimming pool in a theater up to code. I heard something as high as like a hundred thousand dollars. And at the same time, I know the wages of what you get paid when you work at New York Theatre Workshop at that time. I think it was something at that time, probably six, 50 a week before taxes, before agent, and before union. So that six, 50 becomes something more like four, 50 a week. Four, 75 maybe, right? I just imagine you talk about alienation coming into work every day and you're taking home 475 bucks a week in New York City to pay your rent and then you see this object that costs tens of thousands of dollars just staring at you. I know there's some designers right now who are making a campaign to do the same thing. They want pay equity and transparency. I think one of the biggest things we can do is be transparent about money. Be really honest about what's coming in and what's going out. For me, like if I'm doing a kind of DIY artistic project, this is a New York Theatre Workshop, but I tell people how much money we have. So when I'm paying someone and it's like not enough, at least they know it's not because I'm hoarding it, it's because I don't got it. And then they can decide in good faith whether that's a situation they wanna subject themselves to. So I think once making finances transparent, I think one of the biggest things I do is really try to open up the building and the ideology of the institution to the surrounding community. This would be a little tricky because that neighborhood is so deeply gentrified that I'd actually be terrified to do that. But I'm sure there'd be a clever way to try to do it so that the people who have been sticking it out there for decades and who aren't coming from the upper crust of society feel represented in that building. They know they have access to it as space, perhaps meeting space, performance space. They know they have access to the institutional resources, the intellectual capital of the people who work there and see themselves represented in the work that's produced from the institution. What else? What else would I do? I mean, I'd also kind of put diversifying staff and leadership in like a very high priority. I would just absolutely make sure that the days of leadership being majority white folks or even majority folks of a certain age kind of is done. There's this piece that I had the honor of actually recording for HowlRound. They do like audio recordings of articles and I cannot pronounce the writer's name but they wrote about their proposal for a public theater in, oh gosh, I'm forgetting the country, I mean like Eastern Europe, but it's this beautiful proposal. I don't know if the article is out yet. For all of the different ways in which they wanna make sure that like the community has access to the institution and basically I would just follow their plan. I wish I could remember the name of the article but yeah, those are some of the things I do. Yeah, maybe that's a connector. There was a famous experiment in Berlin, the Gorky Theater, which is one of the five state theaters, the smallest of them, but still it's on the big street, basically the 5th Avenue or to the London and they had a Turkish German director and the idea was let's have everybody in the ensemble, everybody who works there, the designer, writer, director, there's a few exceptions, be of immigrant community, refugees. So basically, no one looked like me and they said to whatever you would write your own place. It was, I think their Green Party proposed it strongly, was able to get it through the political system and it was a complicated start, it took a year, a year and a half until they got footing and but slowly they developed place, wrote place, re-wrote place, one day before opening night, unthinkable like in German state theaters or city theaters normally and after one became the theater was the highest capacity in the US of seats and most of the youngest audiences and it energized the city and it also produced a new work, young working people spoke with accents, which was normally you are Israeli, Russian, immigrant, you are from Lebanon, from Syria, you would hear it, as you see it on the streets of Berlin, they would subtitle every show into Turkish, they said why do we, they all have to know perfect German, they might not, they might be understood but they can't follow it like me when I watch it, I have to put it on, so they are models out there and yeah, so. Yeah, I mean, the one thing I'll add in is like, state funding goes a long way toward why some of those things can happen, I'm gonna spend a brief moment talking about the public, which is a theater that I've worked at a number of times that I've enjoyed working at, that I enjoy a lot of the work that gets done there but I'm gonna be really honest, there's a drift to that institution, right? That, if you've ever been there, you know that there's a restaurant in the mezzanine level of that building but you think, oh, public theater, for public for all, it must be an affordable restaurant, no, it's actually quite unaffordable, I've worked, if you do their public studio, their new play slot, this always confuses me, new plays get less rehearsal time, it's this bizarre thing that give you two and a half weeks of rehearsal, previews, actors are still holding their scripts, this is of course also where a lot of diversity finds itself, so at the end of the year, they can say they produced this many playlists of color, well, they often got this kind of like ghetto, ghetto, ghetto-fied slot that you fold less weeks. Exactly, yeah. And also less pay, the contract isn't on the same off-broad recode as some of the other houses in that same building, even though it's the same theater, same building. So the point is I leave, you know, let's say a performance or a rehearsal where I'm taking home $375 a week and, you know, you're leaving, wafting out of this restaurant is delicious, you know, cheese burgers and steaks and you think, oh, I'll just pop in for a burger and a beer and it's like $35. So who is that for? It's not for the artists, they're clearly not paying us enough to eat there. And it's not even for the patrons because a lot of them can't afford it either. One imagines it's for donors and for patrons of a certain income level. It's not just that, it's that it's there, it's the smells, you know, it's really the whole experience, the aroma, it's imagine what that same amount of space could be used for if the workers were thought of. I'm literally just pulling this out of my ass here. Sorry if I can't curse. What if that was a mental health clinic for arts workers? I mean, I don't know, if you can build a high-end restaurant, I assume you can build whatever you want. What if they offered free mental health services for arts workers, right? You know, you already had Jill's Pub next door, that was another thing. Whenever my friends do shows at Jill's Pub, I was, oh God, I gotta drop 75 bucks, you know, to get in there is two drink minimum, the ticket. You know, it's exhausting. I wanna support you in the development of your career. Why does that cost more than like a full production ticket? So there's this logic to the public theater, I think, where it's quite cozy with banks. Look, this isn't even a leftist point of view. We know that it is literally the banking class which draws this country into every economic crisis. That is not up for debate. And so we have these theaters that we run and we say we wanna change the world and help people. And we like, meanwhile, we take money from the literal people who destroy, you know, who precipitated 2008. Doesn't make any sense to me. So I think that, you know, the public is already, there's this interesting deal with the city where it basically pays nothing for rent. You know, it has the kind of Disney plus revenue stream of Hamilton passive income. It has these business, these business ventures. And I'm sure somebody's gonna follow up and tell me, oh, it's not as bad as it looks. I don't, I just don't believe it. You know, it's like, how can all, all of this sounds more like the logic of corporate America than it does of something looking for a way out. And yeah, I just think that we need to realign our institutional structures, not with this kind of neoliberal drift into more and more marketization of every single, like literally the art and all the square footage of the building, but how can we align our institutions with the working class within and without of our sectors and industries so that we can, you know, say no more, no more. We don't want this. We're not gonna go along with it because that means we can keep the lights on. We're actually gonna fight against it. Like that's what we need. No, it's quite striking. Yeah, quite striking discrepancies of what we do and what we think we should be doing. What we're supposed to do in a way like the great plays of Chekhov, you know, they're people saying great idea, what would they do? You know, it's completely opposite in their relations and betrayals, you know, on stage and how life it is. And, but if we don't do it in the theater world, how can we ask anybody else if we don't see that level, the system of it? Were you part of that DIY scene or of that movement or what do you think of that? I signed it, but I wrote like a 1,000 word explication of my signing, which to summarize was being very nice, but I don't think that this, you know, I talked about folk politics earlier, but we consider the spectacle of a letter through an anonymous kind of semi-organized, ah, yes, in the chat, thank you. Zenko Bogdan, I'm probably pronouncing their name wrong, but that article is amazing, everybody should read it. Thank you for linking that. Yeah, I kind of critiqued the structure of the movement. I, to this, I mean, I don't know, they kind of had some type of internal crisis over there. They kind of vaguely apologized for something and I haven't really kept up. This was a few weeks ago, so I don't know what's going on, but you know, I think that organizations, unless you're some type of terrorist organization, I mean, you don't need to be anonymous. You actually, you should stand on your principles and you should draw people into your movement in that way. But also the whole dear white American theater and the we see you, the thing about organizing is when you make demands, you have to have an or else. That's kind of fundamental. And it's a whole lot of looking, looking at white American theater without necessarily looking at, as my dear friend Michael R. Jackson would say, looking in the mirror, you know, a lot of people in a certain lot, a lot of the discourse that we see white American theater inspired was a lot of like rightfully dejected black artists and artists of color, but who I kind of felt really just wanted a job. Like they weren't really like, I hate the system. They were just like, I want more jobs for people who look like me. And again, like that's for my analysis, that is not the problem. I mean, it's a short-term thing. People need jobs to eat, but the system is fundamentally flawed. So the movement can't be, you know, put more of us on stage. The movement has to be change how the system operates fundamentally. And again, I just think the basic organizing principle of it was kind of messy, but you know, you look at the numbers, hundreds of thousands of people signed that letter as far as the online version, the petition goes. But this is the thing, if that was a real organization with hundreds of thousands of people that had a or else attached to it and those people were like deeply committed to being organized, anything could happen, right? If you had a hundred thousand people in formation, like ready to change the American theater with a clear ideology and a strategy for doing so, anything could happen. But that's not what it was. It was mostly just, you know, this kind of perpetual raising awareness culture. You know, most people do it, I think, to feel good, to feel like they're a part of something. And that's because we don't have, we have this erosion of social institutions, you know? It's kind of this thing of the past that you join, you know, an organization. It doesn't have to be a communist organization. It could just be a group providing food in the community. It can be a group providing free medical aid. It can be a group, you know, doing childcare. We've, because of neoliberalization as both an economic system and an ideology, we've outsourced so much of the work that social institutions used to provide into the marketplace, into private enterprise. And so both the institutions themselves and the muscle, the skill that we have to develop to know how to be in organized social formations has completely left us. So all we can think to do is tweet a picture, Instagram a photo, tweet a petition, it's always very individualized. Even anti-racism overall, I mean the whole language of it. Anti-racism culture today is this kind of cottage industry telling people, if you don't wanna be racist, do this, don't do this, do this, don't do this, do this, don't do this. It's like this checklist. And most of those things are pretty good ideas, but there's like nothing in the analysis that actually if you really care about ending racism, you're gonna have to be in durable organized formations that are capable of confronting a system. You don't just get to like not touch a black woman's hair and like racism will go away. It's a system of power that takes an organization of people to confront. So, you know, this is a larger idea that I think was a glaring mistake. And I mean this in a kind of point of principle critique, a mistake of your white American theater. Yeah, and that's signing a petition in itself is not activism. It doesn't right away print changes. You pointed out the show solidarity as two demonstrations, but I think what you did is let's engage a talk. Let's create a curriculum that's a new institution of learning, of discovering, of failing. I think it is remarkable what you're doing and it's the very beginning of it. So you talked about, you know, also about new ways of doing theaters, new forms. I mean, the tradition you're from in a way is the living theater. It's, I mean, it's a, you know, that you see a line also. What are new forms? What do you do? What would you like to do? Who do you admire in this? What do you think works? What are your views? Yeah, there's a book called The Good Night Out by John McGrath. John McGrath founded the 784 theater companies. Companies, because they started, he started in England, I believe, and then had one in Scotland. And he was very big that as a proper Marxist, you know, a company should belong to its nation. And so you don't just have this kind of copy and paste. You give each nation. Anyway, it was called the 784 theater company. I believe you founded it in, was it the late 70s or early 80s? Because at that time, 7% of the English people had 84% of the wealth. So this guy was decades ahead of, you know, Occupy in terms of formulating that. And he worked at the Royal Court Theater in its heyday. And I actually get a lot of my analysis from how he read the room at the Royal Court, which was ostensibly, you know, this place where the working class comes to life on the stage. And it prided itself and branded itself and mythologized itself as this institution that promotes the working class. And he noticed these things of like, well, none of those actors are really working class. If you really think about it, by the time it gets rehearsed to all hell, that's not even really how working class people behave. When who's coming into the theater? How are they behaving? Well, you know, they're sitting all prim and proper. They had to pay a certain amount of money. They've got on their Sunday best. They've got the perfume. They've got, they can't laugh too loud. They can't squirm too much. Nothing about this is actually, if anything, it is a place where bourgeoisie and bourgeoisie-aspirant people get to pat themselves on the back for engaging in a very sterile way with what they perceive to be the working class. So he had this experience and he left, obviously. And started his own theater company, but he was stuck. Well, then I know, as you were saying earlier, I know what it isn't, what is it? And he was like, well, I just got to go to actual working class people. So he starts going to pubs. He starts looking into how do actual working class people entertain? And he found, you know, he's kind of, I don't remember what they're called. It's some English term, but these kind of places where, you know, you go in the door, there's a pub, there's a bar, people are serving up pints, but maybe there's some wrestling and then they clear the wrestling. And then there's a little song and dance number and then they clear that. And it's just, you know, it's wild. And this is what actual working class people at the time were primarily engaged in. But, you know, here's a Marxist that is for, you know, his skill set is theater. So he starts asking, how can I fit myself into this place? So the company ultimately has to start by embracing the kind of set and setting that working class people are used to, these environments which are not controlled, you know, places where people, you know, police all their behavior and conform to these standards. That has to go out the window. And he said, well, maybe I want to do a play, but instead of hitting people over the head with a two hour play, it's we're going to start with a 30 minute play and we're going to start with what they want to see. They want to see some song and dance, we'll do some song and dance. They want to see some pantomime, we'll do some pantomime. And we'll warm them up to the idea that we can actually make a theater that's dealing with what's going on in their lives. Now, what's going on in their lives? Alcoholism, because people can't get jobs, therefore domestic abuse because these dejected men, you know, in a kind of proto incel way are taking it out heteropatriarchally on their spouses, et cetera. So this is not, again, even working class stuff that we associate, you know, generally within the bourgeoisie theater, he's like, what's actually going on in your life? How can I actually put that on stage? And he dialectically, as any good Marxist will do, continued to evolve and found that at a certain point, he can make the plays 45 minutes, an hour, an hour and a half to the point where now he's touring, you know, all the kind of English countryside that people are, you know, sold out. These are sold out tours of plays designed with these people in mind, speaking their language with characters that have been, you know, their dialects and all this kind of stuff to the point where he has a successful company, right? So it's a whole, so I'm deeply inspired by John McGrath in this book. It's a series of lectures, it's very short. I deeply recommend it. And I think, you know, he was writing decades ago in the UK, I think the question, you know, that I have is what would that look like for me, right? I think I'd like to do some mutual aid that just happens to have a play going on, you know? Maybe we're giving out food, maybe we have an arrangement we can give out, you know, vaccine shots. People are gathered in an outdoor space and if they wanna stick around and see a little show that's dealing with stuff that's going on in their communities, physically in their communities, then great, we can build a rapport with the community from there and kind of, you have to work dialectically is the other thing. You can't just come in top down, swoop into a community and like tell people about themselves. You have to build a relationship. You have to go back to the drawing board as you learn. So it's hard to say what kind of forms I want. I think that the forms come from the people and I think that it starts, you know, fundamentally with talking to people. You know, how much do theater institutions actually talk to people, do you know? Like an actual dialogue, inviting people to really open up and let them lead the conversation. So I think forms will become important. Particularly, I've written my first play. It deals with maroons. People generally don't know what maroons are. They are people enslaved people who instead of running to freedom in the North decided to run, well, it doesn't have to be in North America, to the North. Wherever freedom was, whatever free territory, instead of trying to run to the free territory, maroons are enslaved people who try to make their own freedom and deeply secluded environments like swamps and forests and mountains and stuff like that. Great examples of maroons historically come out of Jamaica and Brazil, Quilombo in Brazil, and gosh, I forget her name. I think it was a Queen Nanny or something in Jamaica. But I'm writing about North American maroons, which we actually don't have a lot in the historical record about. So I get to kind of imagine. And I basically, early in the pandemic, I had this realization that while I wouldn't mind the play being produced in a formal theater, I wanted to be able to work with none of that. I want this text that I'm writing to be just as effective if it were staged in a literal clearing in the woods as it would be effective if it were staged in a theater with sound and lights and props in a set. So that's a term that I've also had. It's like, I think that our material shouldn't necessarily assume the primacy of bourgeoisie institutions and the literal material structures that we associate with the production of drama. I think that they should be versatile and adaptable texts. So that's my personal answer. And that's also my theoretical kind of inspiration. Wow, that's such a significant point. And you're right. Who does really talk to the workers? Everybody wants to speak for them. Everybody wants them to buy tickets, but that's not what it's really about. So who really talk to listens? And what do we do for them? We attack politicians and say they have been no longer interested. And they just see people as voters. We say businesses see people just as consumers. They don't see them as whole people. And perhaps also in the theater, business or film and movies, they are just ticket buyers and you compete for them and you manipulate the massages so you get the biggest audiences. And then that's a success. So I think we do and have to reinvent everything, question everything we do and you do the question and everything before we go, who do you, but as artists, who do you look up to? Who inspired you? Or as writers, who formed you, who was important for you? You know, that's a good question. It's such a mixed bag of people is a little nontraditional, especially because I'm not gonna name a lot of playwrights, but I would say as a writer, Raymond Carver is deeply influential to me. Excuse me, I think, you know, I'm a sucker for the kind of minimalist prose, but more fundamentally, you know, we're in this moment where people are like, we've talked about diversity and representation. My thing is like, I'm not saying, you know, I'm always like, no, I'll read a write writer, I'll watch an all white film, just please like, be really white, you know what I mean? Like some, most of the times in white writers, white, the subject is this kind of neutral character that actually doesn't really have a race. What I love about Raymond Carver, what I love about Raymond Carver's writing is that long before any of these discussions were popularized, I just really felt like when I read his work, I'm learning so much more about kind of Americana and like the kind of myth of white American-ness with such sad specificity, do you know that I love it? It's instructive just as much as it is good art and good storytelling. And so I'm not interested in writing about those people's lives, but you know, for whomever I'm going to write about or even portray as an actor, I hope to have that level of like, you know, there's such complex characters that are so clearly entrapped by the material reality of what it means to be an American. And I hope to do that, you know, from my own point of view. Samuel R. Delaney would be another writer, particularly his novels. You know, I was reading him as a kid long before these discussions of representation were popularized. Before it was even really something on my brain, I've always loved sci-fi, but I think it's very, in retrospect, it's very telling and obvious that I was drawn to the work of a queer black science fiction writer who, you know, was kind of a bit of an outcast and in some ways still is. Speaking of black sci-fi writers, I'd say Octavia Butler is a big inspiration. I think what I love about her work is obviously very visionary. She too is dealing with, you know, maybe not like Raymond Carver, but, you know, her work is very much set, you know, with America and American ideology as a character. Whether it's Kindred, which I don't know if you know this, but Brandon Jacob Jenkins is actually turning into a series for, I believe, FX or Amazon or something. But, you know, in Kindred, if you don't know the story, it's basically a woman gets sucked back into antebellum slavery and the present time she kind of goes back and forth when she learns all kinds of stuff. But, you know, American history is a character in that story. It's not just a setting, it's a character. But even when she's doing the parable series and she's writing America 50 years in the future, you have climate catastrophe. You have a Trump-like president figure who's kind of galvanized the fascist. These are some of the things I'm drawn to. I think one of the last things I'll reference off the top of my mind, and this is maybe a bit strange, is the rapper, singer, songwriter, kid, Cudi, who, although I'm not a big fan of his more recent work, you know, this is a guy who entered into a very kind of hyper-masculine moment in music and chose to be super vulnerable and talk about mental health and addiction and sadness and to use a kind of sonic palette that was completely his own and very left field. And it's one of those albums, his first mixtape, I listen to it now and I still find myself getting very emotional. And so I'm very inspired by any artist like that who's able to completely cast off judgment about what, you know, what art commodity should look like, how personal is too personal. And just tell their story, 100% raw. And yeah, I hope to bring that as well to anything and everything I make. You really do. I think it's astounding, your range of engagement, your artistic work, which is clearly also excellent, you know, the OB and all the work you have done, but also your vision and that mission and to not see things how they are, but how they could be, but also looking really how are they and it's not misreading them. So it's quite interesting what you're doing now. You stay connected. What other way we would do it? It's a big people sign up for the Academy. I think it's a great way to engage, to think, to learn together in that idea that everybody, you know, learns together, but focus on something that's important. And it is a time to read. It is a time to think and it's a time to prepare for when we are back and things have to be different. They need to be different. And if not, what all these people died for in Corona, you know, if we don't take something out of it, we will continue here, our Segal Talks this week. Tomorrow we have the invisible dog with us, founder Lucian Sian and the Raja Fakali, a choreographer. They will come and talk about that great institution, what they do, how they survive Corona, what their plans are and where they are going. And then we have a great and really a world known, Kirill Serebrenikov, a Russian director, a film director also, someone who has been banned, was on the house arrest, was no longer speak, created a small theater, the Gorky Theater, this became one of the best theaters in this country. The theater is very significant. It's been taken away from him in January already. He has been slandered with lawsuits of taking advantage of funding, which is baseless as far as we know, when the human rights was set. There's a great, great artist who is also with us, someone like Chris Myers, who believes that we have to take a stand as artists and we have to show a signal through the flames and hint to a possible, a Topian, a model there to also engage with the things, how they are, they will not stay the same. Things have changed already, but we don't know where Scotland Art has to play a role. If it doesn't speak now, it doesn't function now, if it doesn't make us know whenever. And we have seen as those theaters, the ones who are part of the industrial model in a way, the Broadway, so $5 billion business, they're not functioning, they did not provide for the communities, for the neighborhoods, they did not pay artists. As far as I know, there were efforts, but they are comparatively small to the buildings. Thinking about that, the Lion King itself made $6.2 billion from the Disney Corporation, the largest profit ever done by the company. That company is theme parks, films for over 100 years now, almost what have they done to continue that outreach and also to create what Chris pointed out, the community and to speak to people and listen to them and create something that's meaningful. So it's a chance where we are now, you're on rock bottom, it's something you can build on, it's from ground and I think what you did as one of many initiatives of what artists do, it is a great adventure, it is important and significant and it will lead you to something, also something that will come to you while doing things. So I really thank you for joining with us and I hope it was also meaningful to you, it was I think important to listen to you really and I know you have much more to say, but we continue one day and see how maybe we can collaborate with the senior center and to our listeners, thank you for taking the time and we started last March as I always say, very few programs were out online, we now have talked to over 150 artists from 60 countries and we have an overview and their things are changing, things are happening and it's good to know about it and also to be part of it, thanks for how around to be part of it and how important they are is what Chris said, you Senko Bogdan's article, reimagining public theaters as collectively organized cultural institutions, you can find it on HowlRounder, I did not know about it, but it just shows how significant these forms are. So thank you and to our listeners, thanks for taking the time, we need great theater, we need great art, we also need great audiences, audience like you are, so it's a big compliment that you get to listen to us. Bye-bye Chris and say hi to your mom and I hope she's doing well. Thank you, yeah. Thank you to every person and so on, bye-bye. Bye-bye.