 Welcome everybody back to Segal Talks here at the Martin E. Segal Theater Center, the Graduate Center CUNY at City University in Manhattan in New York City. It's week 11 of our talks and it's 11 weeks. Every day we talk five times a week with theater artists from New York, from America, but mostly, you know, from around the world globally. If you look at our announcement on the website, you will find out that it's been a very eye-opening to see how our colleagues and friends around the world are experiencing this time of Corona in their own country, in their own four walls, and how vastly different it is country to country, how significant politics and political leadership is, how significant the changes and support for the arts are, what a difference it makes over that. Yes, though, we are looking now at structures in a way, everything is being barely put to the open in front of our eyes and the light of the sun through this Corona virus, a catalyst that kind of like an x-ray shows what is what and as some say, like on the ocean and the flood recedes and we see who has clothes on and no, not what's working and what is not. And yes, there are systems that do work better. It's still catastrophic in the US over one million infections. The next one is Brazil and I think even Italy is to 300,000. So and we do not know what will happen. Will there be second, third waves? Numbers are not good from countries that we opened infections are showing up again. And of course, for us who are in the world of theater and performance, it's a devastating news. We do not know when we will open. We've been hit hardest and first people are out of work, out of jobs. The next nine, 10 months, everything has been canceled. And and theater artists have been freelancing so much, often also do work in the service industry in restaurants and other. This also doesn't exist. So it's a terrible situation. Unemployment in the US is close to 50 million unimaginable and social unrest on the streets for good reason, erupted this kind of a match that was put to the gas lines for confinement and mishandling of this crisis and the killing of George Floyd. And in this week, we have been have been focusing on this. We heard from the National Black Theater, from our friends. Hope from our friends yesterday, I will get tempo and and and we love Woodard James Scruggs so many. And today we have with us in Japan, they would say a living legend. This is Woody King Junior, someone who for 50 years, actually, it's exactly 50 years around the Black Theater and New Federal in New York, he is called the King, which is also his name. But this is how he's called and he has seen the decades and over and has been deeply involved in in what has happening. So Woody, first of all, thank you. Thank you. Thank you for joining us. Where are you right now? I'm in my apartment in New York and I'm sequestered. I like everybody else. I go out with my gloves and my mask. When I go out to get essentials to exist within the apartment. But it's the first time I would say I've had a chance to deal with all the essential things that I have in the apartment and the things that are not essential at all. I got over, you know, six or seven hundred books. And I said, let me go through them and see what hardcovers are first editions. And lo and behold, I have about 150 first editions. So I said, wow, what can I do with these? So I just put them in a box and perhaps when the pandemic is over, I will take them out again. And then there's so many things that you can get rid of, including articles that, especially when you are 50 years old, reviews that you got in 1971, covers of magazines when you got in 73. You said, well, what use are they now? Those are focus questions. You focus in on the rest of your life. And I said, wow, I read this play, but I read this play in 1997. Let me read it again, because I don't, you know, you don't remember. You remember, you didn't do it. Why didn't you do it? Why didn't you produce this play in 1997? That's what sequestering really means. It come to mean that within the structure you find yourself, you work it out. It's like Zoom. I think I was talking to my wife. I say, wow, man, four months ago, no one inherited Zoom. And now everyone is talking about Zoom. Yeah. Yeah, the world has really, really changed. What is your neighborhood? When you look out of the window, what street are you on in there? Riverside Drive. Riverside Drive. Yes. I look out of the window and other people living on Riverside Drive. I do exercises daily. And I look out my window. And I count the number walking past on the other side of the street with masks on and children with masks on and those who do not wear masks. And I say, well, it's always in that hour, 15, 20 minutes, it's like nothing happened. Yeah. This was a very emotional, tough week, a hard week, galvanized movement. How did you experience this week, George Floyd, the killing and the demonstrations? What came to your mind? Well, I've lived through other periods of time where our heroes were killed. And but George Floyd is a hero because it was televised. It was seen by a camera. And everyone witnessed it. And so therefore, there could be no excuses. Aphyxiation, it was very clear. He was aphyxiated and he couldn't breathe. And that enraged us all. Breonna Taylor's killing was when you break in someone's house without a permit. And I understand they made a law that fast. That can no longer happen. You cannot break in without a search warrant. You must have a search warrant now. So and George Floyd's murder, that's the best way to put it, has caused across the world reactions. And these reactions has caused a kind of looking at reality. And they are all very angry, very pissed off, very concerned. And so changes are made. Unemployment happened. Unemployment as a result of the pandemic, coronavirus. And all of these things are happening. I just read about Darren Walker at the Ford Foundation and how they are making drastic, drastic changes in dealing with all of the unemployed, all of the small corporations and nonprofits just to keep people on the payroll, if you will, and alive, if you will, during this crisis. So I look at the George Floyd murder as a mother, a brother, no, no, as a family having lost a beloved son. And they are grieving. And that grieving is not unlike all these other killings. But we didn't have instant replay on things like Emmett Till or things like the murder of Fred Hampton. Or we didn't have that then. The new technology has brought it into our living room. It's almost like, as we are talking now, you and I, this is in people's living room. And they can look at it. And they can say, wow, we want to be informed. And you and the Segal Institute are informing us about issues. And things that we can talk about. You probably do understand. Before there was these kind of talks, it was confined to the black community. Nobody listened. Yeah, you had no ears. Nobody could listen. They had to wait for the black newspaper, which came out once a week. Black radio, which is not listened to by white Americans. So it was very difficult. They would listen to music, hip hop, rap had not come in. But the new media, I think, it's sort of like reaching everybody. And everybody is our audience. And everybody is worldwide. I think the Segal talks, we said earlier, reached something like a couple of hundred countries. Take us back to the moment when you started the New Federal Theater, what was your idea also for a black theater? What was your vision, your dream, your hope? When did that happen? 1970. I came from five years at a company called Mobilization for Youth on the Lower East Side of Manhattan. And we trained young people in the arts, dance, theater, and film. And when the director moved to a company called Henry Street Settlement, I moved there with him. And they had just a building called the Henry Street Playhouse. And we started programming plays that have into the theater because he was a new director. He was starting a new. And the first thing was he wanted to build on to the center and he built another small theater, two other small theaters. And I was the programmer. And in 1970, he named me the director of the arts. And what did I want to call the theater? And I thought about it, reading Orson Welles and John Hausman and those kind of contributors to the American theater scene. I named it the New Federal Theater. And it became a tag that stuck. And what I wanted to do was I think what I wanted to do was sort of like integrate into the American theater. So it was people of color and women to sort of like integrate them into the American theater. The difficulty I saw almost immediately was if I did the play and it won awards, then the whole play could go in to the other theater, whether it was the New York Shakespeare Festival, Chelsea Theater Center, the American Place Theater, Lincoln Center Theater, or, and then it spread. I could go to the Bermuda International Theater Festival, the Pan-African Theater Festival, if I took the whole project, and the interference would be minimal. And these people who were in the play from Denzel Washington back then, or Elizabeth Van Dyke back then, it was just so many artists, Garrett Morris, people you see on television now who are older, was there at the beginning. Samuel Jackson, yeah. Yeah, Samuel Jackson, Latanya Richardson Jackson did plays with us. And Tizaki Shang is for colored girls who can consider suicide when the rainbow isn't up. We did her play. And so, and we can move the whole play because people like Bernie Gerstin, Joseph Papp, Lynn Meadow, Robert Kauffin, they, if they had won all the awards, they didn't come in and change it. They stayed intact. And so, if a critic came to see it, he said, wow, this is the same play I saw at the New Federal. It's wonderful. It just reaches now an audience that they didn't have there. It was only black people there. But as they died off and that system said, oh, we got to change. We got to start doing plays by our white writers. Did you feel that at the time you started out where you're part of the New York theater scene, or was it kind of separate? No, no, no, we weren't a part of the New York theater scene. I was a part of it because I came in with all these degrees. You know, I came in like a tornado. I came in, you know, it's like you couldn't tell me I couldn't do anything. You know, I did the voodoo Macbeth. That was 20 characters. The conjure man dies. It was a huge place because I had the backing of the great Henry Street settlement. And it wasn't long before, as a result of that, I was working for on special projects with the Rockefeller Foundation, special projects with the Ford Foundation. That just spreaded my, in a sense, just spreaded my visibility. And my use of theater surveys led me to other writers, other productions, the Free Southern Theater, theater in other cities, theater artists who wanted to be in New York and would send stuff and they would come into New York, you know. And that's the real, it's applicable to today. Today, our latest, for example, a year and a half ago, we did a play called Looking for Leroy. That just came to me in the mail. And we did it as a production. Because from the inception, we worked with the Actors Union, Actors Equity Association. And that's because I was a member so early, you know. So I just felt it was something that we should do. A lot of companies do not do that. And so later in life, artists, actors, if they are not a part of that system, they're not integrated into the American theater. I mean, do you see right now in these weeks that the DIY Broadway manifesto and people say Broadway is racist? Do you feel things have changed? Was it the same at that time? Is it better now? Is it worse? It's changed. At one time, New Federal might be doing seven or eight plays a year. We had three spaces. And at that time, it did not cost as much. To do a play on Broadway now, a regular play may cost a million and a half. You know, we don't have those kind of investors on Black theater. Musicals may cost three or four million. You know, maybe more. There's a play on Broadway that the pandemic, of course, closed it down. Call ain't too proud by the temptations. And all of the temptations are from Detroit. Motown Records. And I'm from Detroit. I grew up in Detroit. So it's like, guys, you would see in a restaurant. Guys, you would see at the gym. Now. You have actors playing them. You know, but back then. The change is. They're part of history. Like New Federal will be without a question. Some sort of part of history. And we have to have hopefully. Discussions like this to. Help correct that history. We're in the National African American Museum in Washington. We're in the Schomburg in New York. You name the music museum. I work. And our history is included in that. And Frank, you know. This medium. And I hope you recorded this is. Something that is collectible. It is useful in. Research. Young people cannot say. Well, I didn't know that existed. It does exist. And they said that young people. You know, 71, 72, 73, 74. 1976. Could say I did not know that. And then we started winning awards. Prior to that. The drama desk award. For black girls. So the white world knew about black girl. To the American theater in the United States. The Taken of Miss Janie. Drama critic circle award we won. And those kind of awards had not been afforded to. African American theaters. Before. It was a raising in the sun and then the big leap forward. And there was a gap between. say we might do two plays a year because of the cost when we would do the same amount of money would do four plays a year. But the cost is director's cost, set cost, all the material, it's not just actors cost. While a full character play, you could do with nine people. That may take 15. They got to get paid. It's like, I don't want to say it's like, but if you look at a Zoom show like this, you need a producer, you always need something else, someone else to assist. You can't do it all. You cannot. And you try to find people who are experts in that field to work on it because they want to integrate into American system. And my search found women set designers, women like designers, women sound designers, and they would come in for those six weeks and you have to house them, pay their transportation in, but they would get the visibility that they had not had before in small towns. So the change, I don't know, the change, as far as I'm concerned, has been about, is going to continue about George Floyd. The change has not been like this worldwide ever. So in the beginning of the new federal theater, you produced shows that would be on Broadway, you right away with your means, you had shows that you could put up. I produced shows that could be produced, integrating into the American theater was not on Broadway. You started at the Henry Street settlement and then it would go over with your friends and the No, they were my friends. Joseph Papp will come over and see the plays. You remember Joseph Papp? Sure. Of course. I like this. And he would say, wow, I don't have to do anything. Just move this to Lincoln Center. That's all I have to do. And pick up, start the payroll then. That's all he had to do. What happened to the Black Theater movement? I think if I remember numbers are down in America. Theater is dedicated to Black writers, Black theater work. Do you confirm that? Is less attention being paid? How is your funding situation? Yes, less attention being paid because these foundations, federal, city, state, and private, now can go to the signature theater, can go to white nonprofits, and they are all over New York. They're all over America. The Goodman Theater in Chicago, the Seattle Rep, they can go to them because they may have a marketing department of 15, 20 people in that marketing department, in the audience development department, in that subscription department. And they could get more bangs for their book. And they were asked to buy more sophisticated fundraisers. But the Black Theater movement, as far as I'm concerned, still exists. Who are your colleagues in the Black Theater movement? You exchange words in the American landscape. Well, Black Spectrum Theater, we're all part of something called a coalition of theaters of color, National Black Theater, Mine Builders, the St. Louis Black Repertory Theater, Eileen Morris at the Ensemble Studio Theater, Plough Shares in Detroit, Michigan. These theaters all exist to produce African-American works. And then there's the National Black Theater Festival in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, that's run by Jackie Alexander and the wife of the Larry Leon Hamlin, Sylvia Hamlin, they run that. So those are people we relate to at least monthly or weekly. It's like, how are you doing? How's it going there? Or what have you? Billy Holiday Theater. These are just the name components and people who view these theaters as part of the Black Theater movement. Do you feel America has done enough to support the Black Theater movement? No. No, it's like, but neither has, well, America. Yeah, America consists of Black Americans, white Americans. And let's face it, Black Americans individually, white Americans individually, foundations, it's just so many foundations. While $10,000 would mean the world to me, it doesn't mean anything from Lincoln Center. They want a hit. They want a huge hit. But the pandemic is sort of like bringing a light to all of this. Now we're all in the same boat. We're all in the same situation, if you will, that we found ourselves in when we started up. And how is that? When we started up, we had a kind of energy, a kind of need. And out of that energy and that need, I could get a job at Henry Street. And out of that need, we could get someone into the New York State Council on the arts, Ms. Venet Carroll, the late Ms. Venet Carroll, or into the National Endowment for the Arts with a man named Vantel Whitfield and A.B. Spellman. And these people were simply a phone call away. So that helped tremendously. But they had very small budgets within the foundation, within Federal City and State. And you cannot make these calls anymore. There's nobody on the other line if you would make these calls at the moment. Nobody can make these calls to who know you, who know your work. You have to send you know, something else. You know, first it went from three or four page proposal in detail. Then it went to VHSs. Then it went to, you got to send this and they may look at it, they may not. So there was no structural support. It was support for projects and for individual plays, but not a sustainable support towards your organization. No. The Henry Street Settlement supported New Federal Theater as an organization, which meant a secretary, me, and a coordinator. That was it. And they had trouble raising money for all their social programs. But we prevailed. We prevailed for 11 years. And now we are on at 543 West 42nd Street, where we rent space, have use of three theater spaces. And 543, back in the day, was where Lee Strasburg of the Actors Studio classes. And then it went into, oh, it was just a terrible, ratting-festive building until Castillo came in and remodeled it and redid it. And that was done through, he's going now, God rest his soul, Fred Newman. Fred Newman, yeah. It's in Hell's Kitchen, right? Yeah. Yeah. Your idea to get involved theater, did it come out of the Civil Rights Movement? Were you a part of that? No. No, it came out of Detroit, out of the university. So what was your idea? Why did you say, I'm going to do theater? This is what I will, Black Theater, this is my mission. I was enacted. And I started a theater in Detroit. And I will come to New York once a year and see plays. I will write letters. And these letters were answered sometimes, sometimes they weren't. But I will write to people like Ozzie Davis and Ruby Dee or Fred O'Neill, who's the head of the Actors, he was the head of Actors Equity Association. Lloyd Richards I will write to because he went to Wayne State where I went. But I was an actor. I came in and I did plays for a while and TV commercials at the beginning of that. And I would take my money and produce plays, took my money and bought property in Harlem, and moved my family there. So when you were in Detroit growing up, what was the moment or what was when you said, I'm going to become an actor? What did you see? A Raised in the Sun, toured. And it came to a downtown theater. And I had found a way that you could see plays if you wrote reviews of them for the small black newspapers around. So I would go in and see a play. And I got to meet the cast then of the Touring Raised in the Sun. And they were just wonderful. I would walk them from the hotel, I mean, from the theater back to that hotel, from the theater back to and it was almost like you again, you again, you're here again. And yes. And then I started looking for theater schools in Detroit, outside of the university, because you couldn't get any plays at the university. Why couldn't you couldn't get in because you were black. They were doing, it was no chance. You could not get into plays. It'll be a white director. It'll be a white player. It will be his interpretation of that play, you know. And so I went to a theater school, a very famous theater school. And at that theater school, a woman named Teresa Way Merrill was a grandom, who was in a wheelchair at that time. And she was the founder of Willoway School of Theater. And it was in Bloomfield Hills, Michigan. They would train me, but they told me right up. We don't have any African-American actors here. You are it. And you can be in these plays, but you cannot do intimate roles with white women on the stage. They told me and they gave me a scholarship. And for that was my first foray into this theater thing that trained me to be an actor. But I got the four years. I got a certificate. And she would give me talks. And in those talks, she would let me know who's coming in this year. Ilka Chase, Harold Klurman, Basil Rathbone, all these famous actors. And they all urged me to check out New York. And how would I do that? How would you get to New York? And they had something called Detroit is an automobile city. And you drive cars into Pennsylvania for these companies. And the closer you can get to New York, usually it was Pennsylvania and a bus from there into New York for two or three days back to Detroit. We found ways to exist. You find ways. Did you ever play when you started for four years? Did you get a main role? Was that was ever played by a black writer? No, these are all scenes, all scenes, among walls or scenes. You know, Harold Klurman was a contemporary of so many New Yorkers. And he talked to me about the actor studio, you know, which I'm very in sync and a member now. Back then, nobody knew them. Yeah, right. Harold Klurman, some people say talk the group theater into being and actually also taught at CUNY and where we are. When you came to New York, did you feel the only chance to do your theater? You have to do it on your own. You have to be produced and you have to be the creative force behind it. Was there anything, any openings in what people now say? And you say to the end of the kind of white theater, the theaters where you know it's run by white institutions, white people. Were there openings at that time of the late 60s, middle 70s, where we think of a time of change? Well, I didn't think of time with change, but I was very close with Wynn Handman at the American Place Theater, very close. And that was the and I, after that, I became close with Joseph Papp at the Public Theater, you know, and after that, Robert Kalkin at Chelsea Theater Center. But they're wonderful producers, wonderful producers, you know, but they had their agenda plays and they wouldn't, you know, they're going to do one or two plays a year out of 10, 11 plays. They weren't going to jump in and do a lot, a lot of plays by black authors. What did you learn most of those 50 years of producing, which is an incredible amount of time, I really want to congratulate you and show all of our respect for being such a pioneer, for having carried that, that wagon, you know, through the fields for so long and also so successfully. What did you learn? What did what did it teach you? Well, I would say each play that you read must stand on its own and deeply rooted in literature. You must be deeply rooted in literature. And see, and before coming to New York and in the early years of New York, literature, whether it was Chekhov or James Baldwin or Ralph Ellison or John A. Williams, I am equally fond of all of them. Tuginia, First Love, I love that piece. Fantastic, yeah. Novel, Novela, yeah. Pardon? Shorty, short tale, First Love, yeah. Yes, yes, yes, yes. I love that piece. Then I started reading African American women literature. Louise Maryweather, Maya Angelou, her early, early work before, because she was a dancer at first. And I thought that was fascinating. And of course, early work that I adapted and did at the Likon Center for the Performing Arts, Likon Center Museum for the Performing Arts, was Langston Hughes's The Weary Blues, a series of poems and all that. The Great Margaret Dana, my best friend was a novelist, and Ron Milner. And the librarian in Detroit was a German guy named Kirch Meyers. He introduced me to Theater Arts Magazine. I don't know if you know Theater Arts Magazine, but it was... He's beautifully printed, printed, beautifully typeset. Yes, yes. Yeah, I have some copies, yeah. And they published a play in every issue. And they will have these short articles. But it was that kind of world, Frank back then, that one becomes engulfed in. That's your life. That becomes who you are. And the deeper you go, the deeper you have to go to stay there. And if there was a book party, I was always invited. I was deeply rooted in literature, African literature, Willie Kosacyli from South Africa, writers from other states, playwrights, I would find a way, or find out what they had written because they could only get a reading. There was no theaters in that town. And then the universities started really hiring African American to run theater, to work in theater, work in theater departments. And I became friends with them. And they were women, and they would graduate women and people, and they had no place to go. And so the new federal theater was a place they could go after graduating, if they could not get a teaching job. So it's a struggle, yes. It's still a struggle, yes. We are doing conversations Tuesdays in June. These are conversations with people who are now well known in the world of acting and directing that started at New Federal Theater. Did you define your work? Is it political? What do you do? Are you a political theater? No. Each play is about, I guess that's everywhere. It's about its content and how it touches people. If it's a political love story, then we look at it as a love story, and that's what we deal with. If it's a political drama slash drama, we look for the dramatic structure and conflict in the play, not any political statement. So I don't know, when you say political, I would say the murder of George Floyd is political, but the story is his brother and family. It is not about the cops. It is not about anyone other than, say, his girlfriend, maybe, his child, his son, that must grow up without a father. Those are the plays that we look for. Political, no, I don't get involved in that. For example, I don't think a play about I don't want to say Bush. I'm Democrat, so I don't get involved in political plays. In this time of corona, where you said you look through your books, your articles, and your writing plays, in this time, did something in you change? Do you have a different awareness of having been confined at home for almost three months? Do you feel for you, also as a person, something has happened? Or is this a time of wait and rest, and you go back out and continue? No, no, something has changed. I can look around my apartment and whoa, I've got in my office here, I had, I think, three boxes of first editions. I think I said that earlier. I never knew I had that many books, those first editions. I had maybe one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten shelves of books. My wife may have five or six shelves, so you go down the hallway. It's books, it's books. And in the years that I've been in this business, I've read almost all of these books. So I've come to a conclusion that there are so many, a book is only a series of ideas by one person. And if you absorb them and listen to them, they will tell you a direction. They will give you an indication that this has happened before. This pandemic might have taken another shape or form, but it has happened before. So you better, I don't want to say better, you better be aware of it has happened before. The worst thing of all is if you are not aware that it has happened before. And so being at home, being observant, going through all this work, and your wife, my wife really has to do it. And we've never been confined for three months. We've never been in one space, and we talk about everything. We may talk about politics. We may talk about an artist, and we may talk a great deal about the discussions of rapping with artists, the Tuesdays in June, about the wonderful journey of S.C. Pater Murkerson, the wonderful journey of Ruben Santiago-Huckson. These are journeys, and you said, whoa, man. And we'll talk about that. And they started off in New Federal. What did you think? You really made a great contribution. Do you think, I mean, in the moment we experience as theater makers, we are not essential. Everything is shut down. On the contrary, we would now contribute to the virus, to the spread of it. Normally, we don't have money. We don't have space now. Now it is even more obvious. Do you think when everything opens, theater is really needed? Do we need, I'm not just asking it rhetorically, but what are you saying? Why do we need theater? Well, we need art. Art nourishes us. Whether it's a sculpture by Otto Niels, a painting by Camille Yarborough. We need that. That nourishes us. We can look at that and it makes you feel something. When you go to a play, we need to see ourselves somehow reflected in the statement of the images that is projected on stage. We need a raise in the sun. We need to know that Claudia McNeil, oh, she's very similar to my grandmother. And you think, wow, the grandmother is all over. We need a sister like Ruby Dee, who was in that play, or a brother like Sidney Poitier. We need a reaffirmation. Art reaffirms who we are. And affirmation is the key to existing here in America. If you're not affirmed, you walk around burning buildings at night, robbing banks at night, killing, putting a Ku Klux Klan mask on and killing Emmett Till, throwing him in the river at night. You know, peaceful riots happen at night because we don't have art or music or theater anywhere in our lives. We don't have anything that reaffirms who we are. So we will assume, which is a terrible thing to do, that I'm out here alone. So if I knock this window in and break in tomorrow night at this rally and steal a ham or steal something, it's not going to last more than a day. So I say, wow, they don't have a reaffirmation. They don't have an identity. Art solidifies one's identity. You know, James Baldwin is the fire next time. I don't know, and nobody knows my name, if Beale Street could talk. Johnny Williams, Captain Blackman. I'm just throwing these out where I read them and there is a reaffirmation in them. And that's what I try to do in my art. I looked at a film I made that was streamed yesterday from the Museum of Modern Art called Right On, starring the original Last Poets. And with the advent of television, Felipe Luciano, who was in that film as a young man, maybe 18 or 19, as one of the Last Poets, did an introduction. And I looked at him now and in the film. And he's in Puerto Rico. So Art, again, Frank, to answer your question, I hope I got it. But I think Art is a reaffirmation solidifies one's identity. And in terms of identity in America, one could say, and James Baldwin said this, if you don't know who you are, and where you are, and what you are, you will root for all the Indians being killed by Gary Cooper. If you know who you are, you will realize, wait a minute, I'm the Indians. I'm, you know, I wouldn't be rooting for Gary Cooper. But the story is about Gary Cooper. You understand? Some white guy wrote this story. And that's what it's about. And that's why I'm involved in the arts. It's told by me and some black writers. And people come because they see a reaffirmation. Now after, I guess, 1971 or two, that film I made and produced is just as fresh as it was then we did it then with the last poets. Yeah, no, you made a great, great contribution to American art and American theater. And I think you're your advice, you know, about that art, actually, in a way, since everybody talks about defunding police, yeah, take some of that money and put it into art. It keeps us a healthy society and good society. So now, of course, we do need a police, you know, domestic violence or other things, you know, we need some kind of a civic force. But not how it is now on that art makes a contribution, especially also in New York City, that makes the city what it is. We are coming closer, you know, to our end. I mean, two more questions. One is your colleagues now, let's say Nigel Smith at the Flea, Thomas McCrory at the National Black Theater, the Classical Theater of Harlem. How are the young writers or the next generation, the Susan Laurie Parks, Len Nodig, Katori Hall, Thomas Spretcher and everybody, how are you in contact with them? Do you feel this is now the next generation doing their thing? Are there crossovers? Well, Jonathan McCrory at the National Black Theater, we are, I was very close with Barbara and Tyr, who founded the National Black Theater. I think the Flea, I'm not in contact with them because they do, they did mostly quite plays. Who else did you say? Nigel Smith, who's now took over and the other one is the Classical Theater of Harlem or others. Also the contemporary Black playwrights and all of it. Do you feel you are part of, is that a living structure, you know, of Black theater in New York? Or is it because the city is so big and so vast that there are also islands producing their work? Well, I think there are islands producing their work. I think you're right. Ty Jones at the Classical Theater of Harlem to produce outdoor theater at Mount Marsh Park, I think is wonderful. I just think it's absolutely wonderful. What does he do in the winter? His summer theater program is awesome. But he's always looking for a space and funding for his theater. I don't think the Flea is in our league. I think we are about something else. Playwrights want to get that work done. They just want to see it. They just want to see the play up there. A lot of times the ego is not ready to be put up there. A lot of times it's ready. And they don't have the personnel. They don't have the director who can give a direction. They don't have a producer who can talk to them about it. Art takes conversation, you know, whether it's over coffee. In the old days it would be in the coffee houses. In the new days it's over beer. In the new days it's over dinner. But it takes conversation. You got to talk about a piece of art. You got to talk about why this play really works. But I don't have the money to do it. So the writer don't leave thinking you hated this play or her play. You got to tell them. And I think that's what's missing. And sitting across from them is very difficult. It's very difficult sitting across from them when you really want to do a play and don't have the money to do it. And it's very difficult to do, say, Ty Jones doing a piece about the classical theater of Harlem, a piece of Shakespeare. And it's really wonderful, but he doesn't have the money to do it. A classical play, a Shakespeare or some classical work. Yeah, no, I think you really point out that there has to be a funding structure in places about our Black National Theater, so who made such a great contribution. There's an expression of arts of people who of course live here, but also in the world, you know, theater, the innovations and the contributions, they have made a unique way to see what we call life or to experience life and to create meaning. But also he said, yeah, we need to talk. It's about conversations. And I hope all this is over. And there will be many, many talks. There will be no ways of funding, also structural fundings of places and organizations, less projects oriented. And then we all look a little bit closer in how the distribution of resources for making art are made at the moment in America. And as you point out, and so many others, and also this DIY theater movement and all of it says, no, it's not just, it's not right. And it represents what is actually what's wrong. As a closing question, we often do that to the young artists, the people who might not be listening or to yourself when you were a young man coming from Detroit and coming to New York. What would you say to artists now at the moment if they are thinking about creating art, they're getting through Corona, through confinement, so in the lockdown, what do you think is of real importance, what is meaningful, what we all should be keeping in mind? Reading, reading. You must read. Young artists must read. I would advise reading American Theater Magazine that will tell you what's going on in the theater across America. Read, read, read. And a young artist, a young black artist, he's got the Schomburg here. He's got Lincoln Center Library. He's got all these places with nothing but books in history. You got to be aware, you got to know in which direction you want to go and books will lead you there. You can't come in and wing it. You can't wing it anymore. You got to have a direction and I think you can get so busy working and doing something and end up saying, oh wow, this was wrong. I should have done this differently, but it's right there in the book. It's right there in the act of prepares by Stanislavski. It's right there in any of those books, you know? Yeah, and it is something what we can do and what we can control at the moment and reading and perhaps also writing will become something that we also have again a closer look. Well, do you thank you so much? We should do that every day and here we are scratching the surface, but I think we get an idea, a full idea of what you did, what you stand for, that long history, that significant history and also making New York what it is as a center. So your contribution is tremendous and I do hope that there will be ways to make funding for Black Theater easier and to recognize it as a significant normal part of the landscape of American theater and that we get away from the highly, highly commercial theater. And as I sometimes say, even the great chefs, who have the $300 menu restaurants, they now know we should have a bistro restaurant where it's so great food, but it's affordable. People can come together, families can come and enjoy. And I think that great, great big industry of Broadway that also produces so many jobs and has five, six, seven billions of revenues. Also, we should find a way to distribute it also money from the US government. There's no ministry of culture here. It's a shocking. We just learned that the first thing that was a narrow in Brazil that the new president, he dismantled the ministry of culture and destroyed any funding for potential critical voices or voices that as you really can say, they affirm, create an affirmation of who we are, where we come from and where we are going to. So this was a most significant contribution. Really, really thank you for being with us. This is the end of this week's talk. Next week again, we take a flight across the world. We had this week four New York artists and Jean-Luc Nossi, the French philosopher, who talked to us about why we do need art. But next week, we go back to our format and we have Peter Schumann with us as an American representative, the great, great Peter Schumann from the Breton Puppets Theater in Vermont. We'll talk to us about theater, about protests, about puppets, about life and the meaning of it all. We will have Govren Rubin and Terrence Colorado from Malaysia, a theater company, a great theater company, partly also working with Australians who also have once been here and hear about how they experience Corona. Brilliant Tanya Bruguera, performance artist also, an installation artist from Cuba. Very, very strong politically engaged artist, Tanya Bruguera will be joining us. Hope Azeda from Rwanda, who did important work also after the genocide in Rwanda, the reconciliation work. And so Hope Azeda will talk to us how it feels, what it means to be the working artist in Rwanda at the moment in Africa. And then Saman Amini, a refugee from Iran who landed in the Netherlands and went to an acting school and then created a work of his own, a place, a table is one of his works. So he will tell us what it means to an Iranian refugee to come to another place, another town, and to create art and also in the in the time of Corona. Thank you for howl around for allowing us to have our Seagull Talks with them each day and in the week. It's a big commitment. So we thank VJ, CI, Travis, and my Seagull team, Andy, and San Young. And again, Woody, really thank you for joining us and it's something everybody should listen to in the community and also reach out to you and help you to also get back. How is the outlook? Will you survive? Will the New Federal Theater survive? We'll see. It's not clear, right? It would be tragic. There are some estimation that a third perhaps of all non-profits might close. We don't know what will happen. It's a time of uncertainty, but as we all know, it is significant access to the arts, access to health, access to education, our human rights, and this is what a society has to do for its citizens. So thank you all and I hope to see you all again next week. Thank you for our listeners for taking such significant time out of their days. Thank you, Woody, and bye-bye. Good reading. Bye-bye.