 And thanks so much for joining us for a conversation with Ann Bogart. I have a couple of announcements about technology to touch upon first. This event is being live streamed on HowlRoundTV. So hello to folks out there who may be watching us from afar. You can follow the conversation on Twitter at atloable using the hashtag you manifest. And there will be an opportunity for questions a little bit later on. So if you have something to say, make sure you wave your hand and wait for somebody to run a microphone to you. Because this auditorium is large enough that we want to make sure everybody can hear you. And also the folks who are watching out in cyberspace as well. So with those logistics down, we're gathered this morning to listen to an amazing artist in conversation with another amazing artist. Les Waters Actors Theatre's artistic director is facilitating this chat. He's also the director of Lucas Nates the Christians in this festival. And it made perfect sense to feature Ann this year, who probably most of you know is an incredible director, the co-artistic director of City Company. And she's one of the American Theater's great teachers. She runs the graduate directing program at Columbia University. She's also the author of five books. The most recent is titled, What's the Story? As says about art, theater, and storytelling. And it's being released by Rutledge later this year. I'll also just quickly add that Ann and City Company have been a really wonderful part of this organization's history. Her work in both the subscription season and the Manifestival has been, it spans more than two decades. And this year she's the director of Steel Hammer and the Victor Jory. And finally, in a much sort of broader landscape, City's impact on the art form has been huge. Not only the pieces that they've created, but the company's trained several generations of theater artists in Viewpoints and Suzuki. So that's probably enough of a preface, and I'm just going to turn the floor over to Les. Hello. Hi everybody. This is my friend. I've known each other since 1999 when I was here doing Big Love and was working on War of the Lords. I think that's correct. We met through that door to the left, and it's much wiser than me, and it's given up. This is a very informal conversation between the two of us, and somebody I admire very, very much. And I think Steel Hammer, I've seen a lot of theater over many years. And it's up there in my top 10. I think it's one of my favourite productions ever. I think it's genius, and I'm really thrilled you're here to be part of the, it's not the 50th anniversary of the human of the 38th, but this is our 50th anniversary. It's great. We thought we'd just talk very casually about what we're interested in now, and you have Steel Hammer as a new book coming out. So let's talk a little about the book and what its focus is. Well, first of all, thank you for being here. I'm happy to be with you this morning on a rainy morning in Louisville, Kentucky. And you can tell the left and I don't get along because we dress so differently. If I could grow up here, I might just do that. Anyway, so it's thrilling to be here. And also in this particular building, what is it called again? When buildings remember they have history? I think it's called as a British scientist philosopher called Rupert Sheldrake, who has a theory of something called Morphic Resonance, which I'm probably mangling what the theory is. Part of Morphic Resonance is that buildings can have memory, or that inanimate things retain the memory of people who pass through them. I suppose that it's kind of loose as trickiest things that you would think of. What is it? A loopy. Oh, loopy trips? Yes, absolutely. Some things happen in this building. I think actors can identify it in spaces when they walk into something and it feels that the space is alive. That's a quick counter through part of Morphic Resonance. That's been the next hour on the work of presidents, but this room and the other theaters in this building all for me hold amazing memories. And the fact that you share it with audiences, that you share it with actors, what does that mean? In a room. I love how comics, you know, stand up comics still in Vegas. There's something they'll say, it was a good room. And then the room they're talking about is like a 4000 seat house or something. The idea of a room being a good room. This room is a good room. And there's something about the relationship between the audience. Do you feel like you own this age? Wait, what are we talking about? I've written a new book called What's the Story? And it's coming out in April 20th. It's a month ahead of time. Have you ever heard of a book being a month ahead of time? It's a month ahead of time. And it's a continuation of a series of books of essays that I've written. One is called The Director Prepares, another is called And Then You Act. And this is What's the Story? Written about the idea of telling stories now and what it means. And I'm a child of postmodernism. I was brought up to deconstruct. Everything that I got is a director I took apart. And I took it apart and took it apart and took it apart. I couldn't do a classic play without taking it apart. And the notion of postmodernism is if you imagine that all the parts of a play are like blocks. So there's a text block and a life block and an emotion block and a structural block and a phenomenological block and a meaning block. What the postmodernists did is they basically tipped the blocks over so they all were lying horizontally on the ground. And so you could pick up text and say, oh, text. Well, that's no more important than, I'm sorry, playwrights. It's no more important than the way meaning is made. This is no more important than the way the light falls on a hand, if you see what I mean. And then you rearrange the blocks. And that was called postmodernism or deconstruction. And I believe that we've reached the end of postmodernism. And that we've deconstructed to a place where nothing means anything anymore. And in the rediscovering of meaning, we have to ask, how do we create as human beings meaning through stories? And so we ask now, whose stories do we tell? For whom? And how do we tell them? And this question, I think, lies with the heart of something that doesn't have a name yet that is not postmodernism, but is the next ism that somebody who's come along in name at some point. And this question has been in the heart of my thinking in the last few years, which is, again, whose stories do we tell? There are pioneers in this, in the theater. And certainly the work of Anandavir Smith or the civilians or Tony Kushner in his own funky way, Emily Mann. They're all saying whose stories are we telling and how do we tell them? And for whom? So this is a book that actually goes back to ask, what is the role of stories for theater? I know stories work on a neurological sense in terms of neuroscience and then I also use stories from my own life because I've always found the best way to teach is to actually describe how I learned it. In other words, if I just describe a theory about something, it's not interesting because the only way that anybody remembers anything is through emotion. And then stories actually create bonds between people through the empathic emotions that are created through stories. So this is a book about that, Mr. Les. And still hearing April 20th. And Steel Hammer also gives a story that I thought, when you asked that question, a story about whom, for whom, and why are you telling the stories? This is for those who haven't seen it yet. Steel Hammer is based around the story of John Henry, the John Henry story about a man who went into a contest to get some machine. One, and died. A, the story of an African-American man who went through this. I think in the telling of the story makes the themes and him visible and hearable. But also, and I thought working on a play, it's just a question you were going to ask me. It was about the power of the story through songs and how a story was carried through time and appropriated by different cultures. It was an interesting way to go. The issue of stories, the John Henry story, the notion of disability, I'm thinking of two things. I'm thinking of, I read something that Tasmanian version of that little island off of Australia. They say that stories are the only way that keeps them from falling off the edge of the earth. They're way down there. Nobody remembers that stories do that. And then I was listening to Terry Gross on Fresh Air and PR. And she was interviewing a man who was an expert in post-Civil War reconstruction. And she, it was interviewing her because she had seen 12 Years a Slave and was so knocked out by the movie that she wanted to pursue it on her radio program. And at one point she asked the man, why this story, why 12 Years a Slave? And the answer was because there's hardly any stories that have survived at that time of the African-American experience for reasons that are political, and the fact that people couldn't write it to work, allowed it to write, but these stories were carried down and so it's not that there's a lot of stories to choose from. So the notion of a story creating visibility or communities becoming visible through story, hence the choice of steel hammer. But shall I tell you a little more about steel hammer? Sure. Yes, do yourself. For those who have seen steel hammer, for those who haven't, you may know that it's based on an oratorio, a big piece of ambitious post-modernist music, written by Julia Wolfe. Julia Wolfe is one of three composers who were classically trained. Julia Wolfe is married to Michael Gordon and he's another composer, and David Lang. They were all classically trained composers and as young people they decided that no orchestras would actually play their music because what they were doing was very funky kind of new music. So they formed their own band and it's called The Bag on the Can All Stars. Which is a very smart thing for these young people to do have done 30 years ago, is they thought, well nobody's going to play our music so we'll get the band together. They're a really fantastic musicians who play their music. Julia had written a piece called Steel Hammer about John Henry and she was looking to turn it into a theatre piece and she went to visit Joe Lillo who runs Brooklyn Academy of Music who said, oh yeah, you should talk to Ann at City Company. They could help you make it into a theatre piece. So the two of us met in Lusange Bay at a restaurant on 7th Avenue on 19th Street, something like that. Yeah, and she proposed it immediately even before I heard the music. I'm embarrassed to say, I had heard Julia's music. I said, this is fantastic. The first thing I thought was The Bag on the Can All Stars musicians together with city company actors. The idea of two communities of different disciplines who come together on the same stage would be fantastic. Secondly, the idea of a piece about John Henry again, whose stories do we tell? Who do they belong to and why are we telling them? This seemed like a fantastic idea. When I listen to the piece and for those who have seen it it's a challenging piece of music. I will say the more exposure you have to it the more glorious and deep and what an amazing journey this piece of music is. So I hope that those who have listened to it once it's actually coming out on the CD like about right now. You can get it on Hikes and things. It's actually a glorious piece of music but to create a dramatic framework for this piece of music I wanted to ask for African-American playwrights to actually tell their own versions. Is Kia here? I don't know. My new year is just to be here. Hi, Kia. There's one of them right there. I didn't see you before. Kia is one of the four amazing playwrights and you're going to see it for the first time this afternoon. I hope you like it. It's fantastic. It is fantastic. You'll know Kia's piece because it's the first play in the feed. We don't have the program saying it's hard to say after this piece of music that this is Kia's piece. Anyway, it's the first play in the order of the piece. I know I did this. I asked four playwrights each to write their version of the John Henry story. I told him a little bit but I told Kia and she really ran with it. I said, oh, it's going to be in a kind of tent show atmosphere. Kia, you went right there. You really wrote a beautiful play for a tent show. But I said, don't talk to each other. Kia Corathrin, Will Power, Linda Taylor, and Carl Hancock Brooks. I said, don't talk to each other about it. Just write what you want to be heard and seen about the John Henry story. Each of them sent very distinct short plays back. I find that they miraculously go together. You'll make that decision, Kia, this afternoon when you see it. Oh, it's coming right up. So taking these short plays and this very ambitious oratorial music and putting them together was the task. And here we are. The whole storytelling thing, I mean, I've always been interested in it because I'm basically... I do, I think. I'm also a rural working class and sort of written out of desperate. I mean, there was no narrative to my parents' lives so I seemed very important to me as a young guy that those voices... Your father was also a steel worker? Yeah, my mum's family are rural and farm workers and my father worked in a steel mill, which was the only industry really in this agricultural area. So steel antenna is profoundly moving to me because I find it as magnificent and as awful in the proper sense. Unendurable as my father's life was. But the story... Yeah, I've always had a... It was driven, I think, by fury as a young man that working class voices, particularly agricultural, agrarian workers' voices, were not heard on the stage, or they were a joke. There were two myths. One, he was stupid and that goes back to restoration drama or Shakespeare. These people are idiots. Or a particularly evil myth that I think is that if you work on the land, it puts you in touch with nature and it kills you. And it's awful. So, I mean, this claiming story is... So how do you think this is going to affect the future of the company, where you go with the work? Is this going to be to the forefront of your thinking about the work your company makes, how you teach? Well, first of all, I'm so interested in the word choice you used, which was fury. Would you say your father or you were filled with fury? I think I was filled with fury. I don't know if this term exists here in this country. In England, there's a term called death, which is applied really to agricultural workers, that you're a deferential worker, that you bow down to the boss. And my parents were classic examples. My mother, who was ill, a lot of my childhood, wouldn't go to the doctor because she didn't want to take up his time, because he was middle class and busy. So I think my own work, for a while, although it ships, of course it does, and there's no somewhere else I think a lot to do with my biology and my age, but I think a lot of the work was originally driven by real fury of rage and things like that. And I was part of a generation of English theatre artists who were transformed by an educational act in 1947, which would get us onto college. And there was a lot of us saying, you know, like listen to us. I think theatre is a particularly middle class profession a lot of the time. Yeah, most purely. You know, I wonder a lot about fuel, and I'll get to your question. And what creates a career? What is it that makes you keep going after lousy reviews, not raising money, not having chances, feeling invisible? And I feel that fury or anger is a common denominator. And I would say, sometimes I joke, and it's actually not a joke, as Freud would tell us, that the first half of my career was based on anger against my parents, and the second half of my career was based on anger against the critics. And that's kind of revenge and anger and fury that I relate to. And that, in a way, is my secret. And I don't have to share it. It's very useful, and when I'm having a hard time, it gets me through the hard part. But to answer your question, our adventure with Steelehammer has just begun. Because when, in starting this project, as I mentioned, there's the bang on the can all-star band. And then there's these four plays. There's the integration, there's the creation of the theatrical context in which Steelehammer now happens. It was very clear to me that we couldn't start with the band. In other words, and those of us who have been in rehearsals would know it would be a horrible thing for the musicians to sit around waiting for us to figure out what we're going to do and how we're going to work on these plays together. And this is about coming here to work on Steelehammer. I said, I really would like to be in the VJ because it's a protected environment. It's a beautiful jewel of a theater upstairs for those of you who have been there. It's a small theater, and we can be there from day one of rehearsal in that room. And talking about a room having history, I've made a number of plays in that room, and they carry the memory of each other. So this first phase of working on Steelehammer, which I'm so excited to share with you, is without the band. The big next step, which will be truly transformational, is to actually work on a big stage with the band, with three singers who are Norwegian, by the way, three Norwegian singers who have no vibrato. That's a funny thing about modern composers. They don't like vibrato. Most opera singers their careers are based on their vibrato. These three singers have none. It's just this straight sound, modern composers seem to like a lot. Anyway, so the next big phase is to actually get together with these considerable artists who are the musicians of the band on the can, the medieval trio which is the Norwegian singers and the actors and start to see what happens. Because Julia Wolf who came last week to see the show, and thank God she was delighted. I sat there as Christian the music director, we sat there the entire time saying she hates it. She's going to say you can't do this. Take my music away. During the show we were convinced she would just say you can't do this with my music. But she was absolutely delighted. She kept saying, oh, you'll see. And how the musician could be actually in the center of the actors in a particular clogging sequence. Yes, I just gave a big secret. So to answer your question the adventures lie ahead and but already working on this piece has altered my DNA well, does it do that? You can't alter your DNA. Has changed the way I think about the theater. For one thing and I'll just say this in rehearsing this play I realized as we're working that most of what the actors are doing actually has to be what the actors are doing and not acting what the actors are doing. For example, is it giving away a section to say that the actors run for a really long time? They run for a really long time in a circle. Okay, I've given away another secret. As we started to work on it it's hard to do but the actors would sometimes try to act the relationships of the play as they're running before they got so tired and this kept saying to them no, just run the audience will bring their own associations about how it feels to do a marathon in your own life to get this particular job done overnight and you stay up all night to what they call it in architecture a charrette where you're up all night getting something finished this is a kind of charrette don't act, just do also with, okay, I gave away the clogging section don't act on top of it just being I've never said that in earlier they believe we're acting but a lot of this play is being more than acting okay, I said I think that's a huge shift and I'm not one to ever attempt to talk about trends in theatre or performance but I do kind of think that's a pretty major shift going on I'm particularly fond of an English theatre group Forced Entertainment who will do 24 hour pieces 12 hours budget? I don't know if I yes, don't they just seem normal to me they seem to me to be what life looks like at a certain point in my life in a way, not to give away the Christians you're doing that too it is what it is I'm not going to give it away it's so it is what it is it's conceit is itself it's it's dangerously so you're really flirting with a dangerous context with Christians do you think this is a genuine shift going on I think my work I can say my DNA is a director shift after doing our town here earlier this year which was a bit wary of saying how it shifted because I like to obscure things for myself and not have it very clear but some things Seismic went on in that about just letting things happen which I think is the same thing do you think this is in the air? I don't know it's dangerous to say it is becoming this because we as human beings too easily methodize things the minute we see an answer we say oh that's how it's done that's what's always worried me about say the few points because I was like what is the few points approach to making theater no no that's not going to solve any problems for you it's a way of training to say open to the moment so I think it's a little bit dangerous to say this is the new way theater is going to be done what I do think is one has to do it in city company what I'm about to say sounds great but it can be really annoying and it's very important is whenever we find the answer to a scene somebody will say what is it really we have the technique is the what is it really technique which is endless because just when you think you have something you have to then say what is it oh it's this what is it really and that can be so annoying because the trend is that we now are scraping away pretense in the presentation of a play fine what is it really it starts to get interesting so I hope it would never stop asking that annoying and irritating question good um I'll open this up does anybody got any annoying and irritating questions somebody in there yeah this cd is out and it's for sale it's for a very long time could you as far as the message still hammer to me it's being hammered all the time about him being trapped in a very very unjust situation but I had a problem there was two hours and the parts were not connected you lost me every time when it got into like the marathon now that you said that oh yeah I don't want to be handheld as an audience member but I would like not to be lost completely through a production and I don't know how it can be done I don't know maybe you uh give a what you know you're saying you give my secrets but to me that broadens the experience if I had known about the marathon as far as the going around and around and around if you understand what I'm saying how can a play not lose an audience members when especially there's different totally different segments in it you know I think actually it's a great question and I'm going to seem ingenious in saying this but I think that all great questions have exactly the same answer and your question is great which is how can a play not lose an audience how can the answer is exactly that's the problem and I'm interested in the fact that you say when you hear the context of it you say oh and then maybe you would look at it differently and I constantly wondering how to bring an audience into the the creative how to allow audience to be creative in the process of watching a play and I do think that the play offers that but it seems like what is help is what you're saying and uh I respect that that's a big issue and uh you know we did a project here in I think it was in the late 90s city company and it was called the audience project and um I don't know if anybody in this room was involved in the XAMP project it was funded by the Pew Charitable Trust and I was interested in that that question about how an audience can be brought into closer relationship to a play especially because it's challenging so we got together how many people was in XAMP it was like 60 some uh focusters we got like 60 people together who would agree to sit in on at least two rehearsals of the play that we would do here in the panel round who would agree to write journal entries based on their experiences who would sit in on one tech see at least one performance and be part of a talk back like this with an audience what happened was an extraordinary thing and I still think about it all the time in terms of your questions so we thought and these 60 people were from all different backgrounds people who've gone to theater a lot people who've never gone to the theater people young kids, high school people older people, different religions all kinds of different and we started all kinds of different we started with I gave a lecture on what I thought about the audience relationship to actors so we set up two bags of seating in the rehearsal a thick floor across the way on either side so you have stage management you have sound design you have director and then on two wings we set up for the audience this was the control group it was a terrible word and so they had promised to come twice and they had to come in during breaks and they couldn't eat during rehearsals well the first day was terrifying because people came and the actors got really upset they said what are we supposed to do you know a rehearsal for us is a private moment we had to work with our hands down we were supposed to make mistakes and we were doing no cowards hay fever and they said no it was a private moment it was a private moment and we did two coward places so after the first rehearsal the actors said we have to talk as city company actors do I'll sit at the bar they said what are we supposed to do are we supposed to entertain them and they were doing well and I realized in that moment it was already worth it this two year project by that moment because I realized I said no I'm the litmus paper you perform for me my response matters at a certain moment it opens up to an audience and I share my experience with an audience but you can't aim it everywhere if you want I can get really gross with the litmus paper analogy but I'll say that so after a while the actors got used to it and even started liking having the civilians come in as we call them and the civilians to a large extent loved coming to rehearsal and loved hearing about what we were trying to do and then I would hear them in the green room during breaks they'd say Steve and Weber's having a down day today that's why they wrote journal entries and then we had a talk back like this after a number of productions the word that came up the most when I asked them what how it affected them seeing a performance after sitting in on rehearsal was the word ownership they said they felt that ownership in what was going on it was a family movie I mean you hear that more in sports right somebody's having a down day they'll get up tomorrow and that relationship and the following year we made a play about these audience members called Captain Pressure was about the relationship between the audience and the actor and your question to me is absolutely key and pivotal which is my interest as a director is for you to have a rich experience and as I said to a friend of mine who's here Rich Pinsky I said to him today you gotta give over to this play let it see if you can find a way in and because it is a demanding play it's not I mean you've seen a lot of work you know how to relate to it it's not easy it's not an easy play to relate to and yet I believe that it has it has a it proposes maybe a different way of telling a story but it's tricky so I take your question very seriously and and wish to find ways to contextualize the work for audiences so thank you I did see Stillman earlier this week so I can speak to that I have one question about that and then a practical question so how much is your intention of the piece with the combination of the music the text and your direction going to fulfill that once the band is present where can we see that it can fulfill it meaning fulfill what I feel like if we saw the band on the can players in the room it would have filled those faces and I think you've even said it that when that happens it's going to make it this even more all inclusive thing and I wonder if that's really how the piece is really meant to be presented where can we see it I think it is absolutely meant to be done with the band and I think those who will see it later this weekend will see that although I think you could also understand it would be impossible to make this play with the band present I find this to be absolutely wonderful listening to it maybe ahead of time would be even better I'm not at liberty to say where it's going to be but it will be and you can find more information on the city company's website I'm just not at liberty to say but you will see it and because it hasn't been announced so I promise you I saw the Lammers last night and I have to agree with Mr. Waters that it was an amazing piece of theater but it was interesting I'd say 10 and 12 people walked out at the end of the show the rest of the audience was on their feet so it was really interesting seeing the the effect it had on the audience you could look around at the audience members and see some of them with what the hell is going on have a look on their face and those were some of those people walking out and yet the rest of those that stuck around to the end I think were pretty much blown away I guess my question to the band would be when you put together a show like Still Hammers how much do you consciously set out to push the boundaries and make people uncomfortable is this something that just happens or do you say we want to bother a few people we want to push the edge well this is going to be a long answer so you might have to shut down the house here my first experience in the theater when I was 15 years old I was also the of a federal program where I was brought in a school bus to Providence, Rhode Island I was 15 and I saw the Scottish play with the Trinity Repertory Company directed by Adrian Hall the great Adrian Hall and it was the first play I ever saw a professional play and I sat in the audience and I was absolutely stunned because I didn't understand a word I was brought up on Disney movies the name of Disney movies same thing and there was which is coming out of the ceiling it was set by Eugene Lee who is known for still making the Saturday Night Live sets this incredibly complicated production and it was that day that I decided to become a theater director and I to learn my first lesson from Adrian Hall I didn't meet him 25 years later or 20 years later and the lesson was he taught me as a director is don't talk down to your audience that it's not about understanding that at the age of 15 I had to take every experience I had up until that moment and use it to try and meet this thing coming at me which I did not understand and it changed me forever and I can never leave that lesson down which is to try to speak from the complexity of whatever my own life experience is as a director, as a theater artist as a company, I've been with the company for 20 years so it's really a collective issue is that we try to make work that feels true and that feels communicative that feels yes challenging it is not fun when people walk out I feel bad personally I feel like oh just give it a chance hang in there it's disappointing but I cannot work differently I cannot speak down meaning I cannot what is it that Lillian Hellman said to the House of American Activities I cannot cut my conscience to fit something in the way so hang on for a second but I propose to you that our approach to theater is not so radical the first time I saw the work of Evo Von Boeva does anybody know the director Evo Von Boeva he's a he's a Dutch director and he came to work at New York Theater Workshop the first time in the 90s I think it was the first production I saw and he did more stately mentions by Eugene O'Neill an impossible play too long impossible to understand and this was the first time I'd seen his work and the way it happened did you see it? these five or six actors walk on stage they bow to the audience they bow to each other on each side of the stage they sit on folding chairs Joan McIntosh, great American actress inhales on stage and starts to speak at top speed the first eight page model of this Eugene O'Neill play top speed and I went oh my god and I'm sitting there trying to follow and shaking and I start to hear this familiar sound that goes like leaving in the first ten minutes I would say a third of the audience left leaving in droves I couldn't believe it and I was on the edge of the seat the rest of the audience that stayed for the five hour production thank you very much that's who I tried now when I thought about this afterwards I thought I could never do that and you could never do that well, as Americans we are populist so what we say as Americans we say okay, we're going to be really nice in the beginning, get everybody to do this in the middle get him off and the Dutch are very different and they're very subsidized this is what's expected, this is how you participate what any audience is doing when they come into a theater you come into this theater tonight to see, is Christian's tonight? no, Brownsville Brownsville, you'll say you'll say as an audience, subconsciously what are the rules, what am I supposed to do you hear it in laughter, for example you can tell if it's a ha ha ha play or a ha ha play or a silent play within the first few minutes what evil Hong Kong was doing which not many Americans could do still can't do is say, if you want to stay here for five hours this is what's expected of you in the first five minutes of the play so one thing that we don't understand is how that negotiation happens between an audience and the actors in the very opening of the play so there's a responsibility to that I'm trying as an artist to be more honest we actually, you saw an early version of what we did it was a pre-tech worker to run through we had a whole scene in the beginning of steel hammer it was really meant to have the audience feel more comfortable and it was sort of like, oh, let's tell you about the story of John Henry it was a whole dialogue that Kia did not write it was put together from various sources we cut it because it wasn't honest and I actually made a joke we didn't run through and I said we need that beginning we actually have the book our book is a Dutch game a little Dutch so we cut that opening scene so you actually see the beginning and you see these actors walk in and you immediately go, this music is hard and what they're doing is challenging I now forgot the question how much do you try to push the boundaries when you put it together? so I try to push my own boundaries and I trust that the audience will go with me you could call that a super big ego or no ego, I don't know which one I assume that there's enough people who would share what thrills me and if I betrayed what thrills me, I betrayed everybody the importance of storytelling and also about your audience what's the importance and how that affects the audience to whom is the story directed and I couldn't help but notice yesterday afternoon that the audience was white and primarily older and many plays that I've been to see unless you go to see children's panel lines or something like that do seem to be directed at a white audience that is also at least financially comfortable because the tickets if you come to see this are rather expensive so how does that affect it if you're telling a story are you directing it? you talk about to whom is this directed but it seems like when I go to see plays that if they're directed that there's always the same audience there how would you respond to that to whom was this play directed? it's again a scarily appropriate answer it is a problem I didn't direct it for a white rich audience necessarily I used to think that one had to cultivate one's own audience I directed a show once in San Diego at San Diego Rep and they said choose whatever play you want and San Diego Rep is in a mall in Southern California and I thought what play am I going to do in a mall in the Southern California because people who go to malls will go to this play so I thought I'll do The Women by Therese Lewis it's a screwball comedy it's got really great roles for women it's really fun it's intelligent it's full of theory it's a wonderful play in a mall except each one had to actually be able to also play Medea because even the third manicurist from the left should have that kind of Medea quality even though they're wearing fabulous gowns I'm getting convinced of your question I promise the first was a really approachable production I was really proud of on the second preview we all know how horrible second previews are right? this horrible thing happened in this mall which was nothing happened the audience sat there the actresses acted their asses off this was in 1992 it was incredible production and everybody sat there like this there was no there there there was nothing happening and I left that night on the plane I was going to I had to leave and come back as it turned out the rest of the run was fine audiences were fantastic it was one of those horrible second previews but when I was on the plane that night taking a red eye I thought I can't direct in malls anymore I was just starting a city company and I said I'm going to live in Sarajoga Springs and people have to make pilgrimages to see my plays and then of course this word came into my head as an American I thought elitist I thought no people are going to have to my audience what I learned in a way that I won't take so long saying a lot of experience and thinking is that you don't have an audience and you don't direct for half audience that's the wrong way to think you direct for a particular part of every audience so when you go to see a play there is a particular part of you that I've spoken to so I never and since I've come to understand this I don't think this is for a certain kind of people I say this is a play that speaks to a certain part of the human experience this particular play steel hammer requires an audience to do something with endurance because the play is about endurance it's about work it's about the kind of work that kills you but yet you love it so I think we're all in the verge of dying from our jobs over work it's a subject so in my mind it was directed for a certain part of every person who can come in I don't know in terms of age how old you'd have to be to actually access that part of you I think an exposure to work would help so that you actually know what it feels like to do American in a sense so I'm going to with time's up I'm going to wrap this up and Boca, thank you