 back here to a seagull talk at the Marthony Seagull Theatre Center. The greatest center queuing in Midtown Manhattan. Again, it's a nice day today here in Manhattan and the sun is shining. It looks like the summer is coming and the streets look fuller. It looks like the city is slowly coming back to life, renegotiating space and talking to people, shopping. And we hear the first signs of theaters reopening. Actually, today I got a mail that says, Michael Jackson, the musical will open December 5th on Broadway, the first note I got. And they're very mixed emotions. Is that what we need? Is that what we want? Is this the right thing to do on the time we're in? On the other hand, it's great to know something will happen, of course not in September. Like the mayor pointed out without double checking, I think, with the producers. I get that it takes a while to put up these big shows. So we are truly in a state of constant confusion. We just talked about it, but also an openness and rethinking. And as yesterday, the producers said from Lithuania, she said, you know, I'm trying to change myself. I will change myself. I think I have a different relation to time. We will do less, but more thoughtful. So the big question is, what are we going to do? What to do? It's a very big question. And today we have with us a great worker in the vineyard of theater, global theater, American theater, Carrie, thank you, thank you for joining us. It is so great to be here. So great to have you with us. And as I understood right, you just had a little journey behind you. You were here in New York and now you're back where you live and work on the West Coast. And for all of those of you who do not know, and we have also international listeners, Carrie is a director, writer, producer and educator. And she now completed 25 years as the artistic director of the ACT, the American Conservatory Theater in San Francisco. Very big deal. Very big thing to do, to pull off. And she's the youngest one ever to run one of the American regional theaters. And she oversaw the rebuilding of the Gary theater and the creation of ATC second stage. And she recreated, reanimated, reenergized everything around her. And she ran in New York, the CSE, is it right to say? Where she staged world's premieres of SR pounds, Electra. She won OBS and many, many, many, many awards. And she's a close collaborator of Stoppard. She is a pinter. And she has worked all across the landscape of this theater, whether it's American theater, European theater, or global theater. She also published books. And she is what we all secretly want to be, a chevalier de l'ordre des arts, the French government. She is a chevalier, a knight, you know, of the arts and others. And she really is also in our book. And so she is also the recipient of many honorary doctorates. And she continues to direct around the world, also at the Gates Theater in Dublin and the Stratford Theater Festival, many, many other things you can walk her up. So why is it important that we have her with us here? Not only of course, because of her life's work and this most impressive output she put together, but in our book, she also stands in a long line of American women who changed theater, as we know, to make a contribution. And there are a lot of them. And often they are bit in the dark once. We had a big program at the single center. And one of them, people like Cheryl Crawford, who was the founding director of the group theater in 1931. And she formed the American Repertory Theater in 1945 and produced Porgy and Bass, the revival, and Tennessee William Place and so many, many others. There's Hallie Flanagan, who grew up in Iowa. And she traveled to New Europe where she met Stanislawski, Meyerhold, Perandello, so many, many others. And during the Great Depression, she got interested in theater and she was the head of the Federal Theater Project under the WPA's New Deal. And she launched cutting-edge and important contemporary work. It was at a time of tremendous change as we are in now. And the thing she launched was the living newspaper, fact-based performances, improvised things. And the Neco Theater Units, as they were called at the time, and so many things where she broke down barriers. And of course, she became also a harasser in the Communist Hunting House Un-American Activities Committee. And of course, we now know how horrible that time was, how wrong that was. And she also was a writer. There was Margot Jones, the big award that is named after her. Maybe one of the biggest American theater awards you can ever get, who established the first professional theater in the United States in Dallas. And she worked with Tennessee Williams and so many others. She produced Inheritor Wind, but nobody wanted to do it from Robert E. Lee and hundreds of non-profits theaters around the world, or around the coasts here in the Americas, followed her work. Susan Glassbell is such an important writer, actor, producer. She founded the legendary Provincetown Players. She started as a journalist in Iowa, followed then her husband to New York, to the village, and then spent the times on Cape Cod, wrote the great, great trilogy, Trifles, and she won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama in 31 as a woman. And she was also the Midwest Bureau Director of the Federal Theater Project. And is credited also for discovering and fostering Eugene O'Neill. Nobody was listening and he dropped out of his playwriting classes. There's Eva Lagaline, who was a great, great Broadway star, who felt that commercial theater is not the full calling in life. She founded the civic repertory theater in New York City and many non-commercial theater companies. And she wrote and openly also had a gay lifestyle. She felt, you know, this should be a way of normal activities for everybody in it. She was a great champion of this theater and supported non-profit theater as someone who at the time, I didn't have to do it where it was new. It was cutting edge. It was a radical idea that you could do something in your own loft, in your own space, and it was not produced in a commercial theater. Lucille Lortel, the great, great American producer, actress also. We have actually a professorship at CUNY named after her. She created the White Barn Theater in Westport, Connecticut. And she created also the American Off-Broadway Movement and Produce Genet, Fuga, Breitbacke, Churchill, Carroll Churchill, and so many, many others. And before anybody else did, the great Ellen Stewart, who left us, unfortunately, in 2011 is a great pioneer. Not any need to see anything about her and the La Mama, the groundbreaking work. She's a black woman, what she did, not only fostering all these American playwrights, all the incredible actors who came to this, but also bringing over the European avant-garde, the international global avant-garde, the Kotowski's and Brooks and others. It's a stunning. The other one in the realm, you know, so many, Olympia Dukakis, we will talk about her, Emily Mann, who actually will join us in June, who also is working for a long time. I've seen 25 years at the MacArthur Theater. And she has also overseen more than 150, 160 productions in the 40 world premiere. So there is incredible contribution. I apologize even to point it out, one shouldn't, a man comes here, we don't read all the, but still I feel there is a line, there is a heritage and you are part of it. So Carrie, how does it feel for you this time of Corona? And I'm sorry about my long talk. We always say it's about listening when I talk and talk, but I felt there really is a long way to start. It's such a beautiful way to start. Because for me, one of the things that's happened during Corona, you know, I left ACT two years ago and it was so overwhelming to leave. I had packed up, you know, thousands of books and then I went on the road really for two years. And so when Corona hit, I had suddenly gotten back to town and the lockdown happened. So here I am. And so the first thing I did is kind of organize my books. And it was beautiful what you just said, because I made myself a vow, I wasn't going to buy any new books till I read what was on my shelf. And one of the first things I pulled off was Helen Sheehy's very brilliant biography of Eva Ligallion, which had been given to me when I came to ACT. And I wish, Frank, that I had read it then. Because I cannot tell you the kinship I felt with her, both her dreams and vision and desires and also her humiliations and failures and despair. The fact that the commercial theater closed ranks and refused to permit that civic repertory theater, the unions particularly, but also the donors and everything to really survive. But the vision that woman had, and when it didn't work in New York, she put Dolls House and Taming of the Shrew in a bus and drove it across America. And she really believed that classical theater could speak to anyone anywhere. If it was beautifully done, democratically staged and cheaply priced. And I read that and I wrote Helen Sheehy a fan letter, you know, in the middle of Corona, I don't even know her. And I said, this book is extraordinary. And then I read all the other ones, I read her biography of Dusa, then I went to Margo Jones, you know, who tragically died when she was 43. And it was Margo who really inspired Zelda, who was my heroine. So I grew up in Washington DC. And the first artistic director I ever encountered was Zelda. And I don't know if you knew Zelda, but I mean, Zelda was fierce and tall and uncompromising. And she was a Russian scholar, you know, so she did check up and she invited all the Eastern Europeans to do, you know, Livio Chule's Wild Duck, one of the great productions ever of Ibsen was at Arena. And that was my childhood artistic director. I heard her speak. And I thought that's what an artistic director was. So you know, Frank, it took me years to realize when I started in the early late 80s, that that that wasn't the case and that women were not very welcome was surprising to me because there had been all these astonishing women. And one of the things that I found as I pulled all these books off the shelf during Corona was, you know, we're at a period of burning everything down. And I get it, you know, we're very frustrated. And we want to start over and there's a big reckoning going on. But by the same token, I feel, particularly for women, post me to, we have to remember this legacy that the American theater was built on women by women on women. And a lot of gay women, as you say, out gay women who were incredibly brave, Peggy Webster is another one. I know she's not American, but had an enormous impact on her biography. Don't put your daughter on the stage is wonderful. And, and I don't think young women know that now. So I feel like they're trying to fight battles, not that they shouldn't be fought, but that we should remember this process has been going on for a very long time. And we actually stand on those shoulders. So I love that I love it that you started that way. And I, you know, I, as I say, I wish when I came to ACT, I had read that book before I started because it was a long, lonely road. How was that last year for you? This year of Corona. Well, I'm a guilty Jew, you know, so I always feel I've done the wrong thing. So when the, but you know, when it started, it was the first time a crisis had happened in the theater. And I was not an artistic director, you know, I, I inherited CSC when it was absolutely bankrupt and it hadn't paid payroll taxes and was about to close. And I had to resuscitate that. And then when I was hired at ACT, the earthquake had happened, the Geary had collapsed. The company had been disbanded. We were in unbelievable debt. And I had to, you know, put it all back together. And then came the dot com bust and then came 9 11 and then came 2008 and the economic recession. And so I had spent a lot of my career trying to, you know, rebuild indigent theaters in times of crisis. And I thought, how could I be sitting on the sidelines right now? I felt terrible. And I was on the phone with all my artistic director friends saying, how can I help? What can I do? And then I thought, you know, I'm not, it wasn't meant to be. So I have to go in a different direction, you know, like, I deliberately, I left that theater when I left it because I knew it was time for me to tend to my own garden. Not in a sort of narcissistic way, but I just felt I wanted to see what my life was like when I could think and read and write without constant fundraising and constant producing. And so that's what I did. So I wrote a book, which I just finished. I started at the day of the lockdown, March 13. It's about Harold Pinter and Tom Stoppard in rehearsal. And I just sent the manuscript off to Bloom-Spray Matthew and my publisher this morning. So that was one thing I did. So almost really from the very beginning of the first days of corona till now where we see some kind of light and things are reopening. So you took the time to write to reflect. What came to your mind in these days? You know, I was, I mean, I was trying to figure out, does anything we make matter, right? In the face of this epic disaster, why do we make art? Because that's the only place I could start, right? And then we couldn't make art. And we all pivoted, I hate that verb, but anyway, very quickly, you know, and I've done a million Zoom readings. I've written two plays during COVID. I've workshoped three plays. I've directed the Bacchae online. I'm working on Oedipus online, you know, and you sort of try to accommodate Zoom and imagine what people's bodies are doing from the neck up. But it's all very peculiar because we are such physical beings. And so in my mind, I think one of the reasons I went back to Stoppard and Pinter for myself is that it was sort of irreducible. I thought they were two writers whom you can never film. And it's not to say there aren't films, not so much of Stoppard, they're Pinter films. But it doesn't matter if there were never films of Pinter except David Jones' Brilliant Betrayal, it would be okay because they are irreducibly theatrical. You know, these are two people who believed that the live event, unexplained, uncompromising, in real time, using all the tools of theater could actually, you know, awaken an audience in a way that isn't ever didactic, but is kind of subversive and magical. And so, so I dug out all my boxes, Frank. You can't believe the stuff I had. I had pages of faxes. You know, Tom Stoppard does not use a computer. I don't know if you know that he writes everything in a Waterman fountain pen in ink and he would fax it pages of faxes. You remember the old days when it would spew out of the fax machine all in one and you had to cut it up, right? And so I have pages of things from him and hilarious handwritten notes. And I wrote down every single thing he said in rehearsal and all the times we did 11 plays together, all the things that Pinter had said to me in the room at CSC when we did the birthday party, letters I got from Pinter and now you're not allowed to publish Pinter's letters. I don't know why they've been embargoed. So, but I have them all handwritten again in ink, even when he was dying, you know, and so I read through everything and I tried to stop and think, what is it I actually learned about about life, about art, about making theater from those two artists that I could record in such a way that other people would get excited about doing the work, not in an academic way. You know, there are a million books written on them by academics and they're all theoretical and they don't help you in the slightest when you get in the room. And so I thought, well, let me see if I can write something that would actually make people see what it would feel like to be in the room with them. And that led me down another rabbit hole, Frank, which has been weird about COVID, which is about Judaism. So, you know, I'm the daughter of a Viennese refugee, my mother, Marjorie Perluff, who's almost 90 and a great literary critic, fled Vienna in 1938, right after the Anschluss. My father was actually originally an Orthodox too from New Orleans, which is very peculiar of Polish and Russian extraction. But I was not raised religiously, but certainly very culturally Jewish. And I don't think I'd ever particularly reckoned with it one way or another. And this COVID, I've been thinking about that all the time, partly because of the rise of anti-Semitism, partly because I wrote a play about Edgardo Mortara, who was a Jewish boy who got abducted by the Pope in 1858. That's a whole other story. And partly because of Stoppard and Pinter, I realized that in a way to me, my connection with them in some ways is that they were both Jewish writers and that I felt central, they were Central European Jews, who had probably your kind of education, Frank, I don't know exactly your education, but a kind of real Central European modernist intellectual education. And not at a university, neither of them ever went to college, but they were so self-taught. And I felt an immediate kinship with both of them in a way because of that. And of course, the birthday party and the homecoming are very Jewish plays. All Pinter's plays are full of Jewish comedy and Jewish patriarchs, Jewish archetypes, but Stoppard is the one that really moved me. You know that this Jewish boy who escaped from Zlin when he was two years old and the trauma of the war and he grows up in India, his father gets killed, he doesn't even know his father's dad. His mother marries this English colonel and they go to England at age eight. He suddenly gives up his name, gives up his language, becomes an English school boy, claims to have let a charmed life. And suddenly in 1996, when his mother died, he had to reckon with the fact that he was a Czech Jew. And that's been his journey since then. And so for me, that's so moving. And it informs his identity split. His fluid identity, his sense of loss of culture that's in all of his plays, I think is really connected to his Jewish history. So, you know, I've spent a lot of time during COVID reading the Bible, reading a lot of Jewish history, Amos Elon's beautiful book, The Pity of It All, which is an incredible book, just a lot of that. So it's weird what rabbit holes I've been going down. Wow, that's, that's quite, quite amazing that you went back to the source of what inspired you to think about also for your spiritual background, your family. Yeah. Yeah. What, what, if you want to share, what did you learn? What do you feel, what, you know, like a painter or paints a year, and then you go to the opening and you share a bit the journey, you know, but you see the pictures and or sculpture or writer about what, what, what, what, what did you learn from that year? You know, identity is a very weird thing. And we are in the midst of this convulsive identity crisis in this country and obsession with identity, which is both a wonderful thing. And I think also sometimes a disturbing thing. Very hard to talk about anything universal now. We're all in our own silo of where we came from, which is partly inevitable and partly complicated. So for me, you know, I think I wanted to transfer where I was placed in the world. And, you know, I think in a time of crisis, you also think about history, right? So Jewish history and being a Jew, whether or not you're religious Jew is a very immediate thing and a thing that is absolutely about history. You know, and as my mother always taught me, the only thing you don't have to practice it or talk about it or believe in it, but the fact is when the knock on the door comes, if you're a Jew, you're a Jew. You know, that's how I was brought up. And I had a lot of relatives who went to England and then sort of vaguely tried to pass, right? And that always struck me as incredibly peculiar. That, you know, my first visit to England when I was 18, I went to the north of England to my cousins. And my cousin, my age was a choir boy at the Hexham Abbey. And I thought, what are you doing? Like, don't you know who you are and how you ended up in England? Hello? And you know, and so I've thought a lot about that, about passing and conversion. And can you ever leave behind who you really are? Should you ever leave it behind? What does it mean to evolve and change? What does it actually mean to be Jewish? And why is antisemitism always the third rail? You know, why no matter what happens in any period of culture, antisemitism doesn't seem to go away. And it's worse now that it has been. And so I had to reckon with that for myself. And what it meant for me, I have to say it was, I had a lot to learn. I hadn't even really studied that much. And my mother wrote a very brilliant memoir called The Vienna Paradox, which was about her immigration. But she didn't come back to writing about Vienna or about anything Jewish for a long, long time. We both read Tom Stoppard's most recent play, Lea Poltstadt, which is sort of based on her memoir at Set in Vienna, in a very elegant family, intellectual family like hers. And, and crazily enough, Frank, if it happens, my mother's getting this award as a refugee in Vienna in June. And I'm going with my daughter and my mother. So, you know, my so three generations of Viennese Jewish women and my daughter and my mother have always been sort of soulmates. You know, it's why I came to California. I took the job at ACT because my daughter was two and my mother taught at Stanford. And I thought, well, at least I'll have the job for a few years and they'll be together. And so I think that will be amazing and moving. And I've only once been to Vienna with my mother, I've been subsequently to work, but never with her to see her it through her eyes. So I, I don't know, when you get older, I think you just want to try and know more, you know, and it helped my writing a lot. It's what I wanted to write about. So it may ask, and he had a little pause after you said, well, I wish I had known the book, you know, I had read the book, what it means to be a female producer and you speak about, you know, your special background. How was that for you running that? It was truly awful. And you know what's funny, Frank? Because we hadn't had me to, and we hadn't had anything like that. But we'd had all these great women, what I wish. I mean, I knew that Zelda in her own universe, she didn't know me that well, I didn't know her that well, but I knew she existed, and that in some way she would have my back. And I met Olympia when I was 25 years old. We just lost Olympia two weeks ago. And Olympia was my American actress and screen actor, feed on screen actress. Yeah. And artistic director, trustee, teacher. And she was my North Star for 30 years. So I had these women, I did have women, amazing women who were older than me, who were rooting for me. But you know, so I got to ACT. I don't know why they hired me, Frank. I think, you know, they were desperate when you're really desperate and no one wants the job, they hire a woman. At least that was true then. There were no women from, you know, I don't know, in that, I don't know. I mean, there were so few women at that time running regional theaters or running whatever. And I tried to know them all. I had been mentored in New York in my very young years by women who changed my life, Joanne Ecolitis. People don't talk about Joanne as a mentor, they talk about her as a great artist, which she is. But I want people to remember how great she was to young women. I don't think people know that. She was remarkable to me and hired me to cast shows for her so I could watch her work. Irene Fornes, who was my great heroine, was the first person I hired to direct when I came to ACT. She directed Uncle Vanya, I mean, to CSC when I was 26 because I wanted to sit in the room and watch Irene Fornes' work on checkup. You know, this was like my education. I never went to graduate school. I have no theater training. I wanted to be an archeologist in my youth, you know, so I studied ancient Greek and I spent a lot of time digging up in excavations, but I had no formal theater training. So those women, Billy Allen, this is a great mentor of mine in New York, Claudia Weil, you know, the women's project, things like that. So Gail Papp, actually. But then I got to ACT and it was so horrible, I can't tell you. There were no women, they had only ever in 25, 30 years hired one woman director, Joy Carlin. They never had a baby and I had a baby. I had a two-year-old and then a year later, I got pregnant with my son. And that was really heresy. They were absolutely appalled. I kept telling them it was a great fundraising technique, which it was, you know, I would hike up the hill in my high heels, nine months pregnant to these benefits and people would say to me, would you just, if you just stop, I'll give you some money. You know, so I thought it was a good technique, but they were not at all pleased at all. And of course, what you realize is when, as a woman, when you fail, you fail for all women, or that's what I felt, they were very patronizing to me, not the board so much, although the board, the women on the board are great to me and the leader of the board, Alan Stein, was so remarkable why he stuck with me. I don't know, but he always did. But the press, Frank, you should, when I went back to read how they wrote about me, it didn't occur to me at the time. You can't believe the stuff they said. I mean, just as if I were, you know, a child. What did they say? Oh, that I had, you know, I was this kid from New York and I had no idea what I was doing. And I was naive. And what was I trying to do? Some kind of feminist theater, very anti-submitted. Because the first thing that happened is I got picketed by the Catholic Church, because I did a Dario faux play called The Pope and the Witch about abortion. And I didn't realize, because this is a clown city, you know, there's a great clown tradition because of Joan Mankin, Joan Holden, the whole wonderful Pickle Family Circus tradition. I wanted to honor that. So I did the stereo faux play, and I didn't realize how Catholic this town was. And I got picketed. And it was very anti-submitted and nasty. And they stood outside with signs and they took away all our funding. And it was horrible. Every day there was another horrible thing. And this is before Twitter or any of that, it would have truly, I mean, now with social media would have been like I would have just been run out of town in real. So they were very nervous about me. And they thought I was a radical, which I wasn't. And the theater was broken. I had to raise $35 million in a year to rebuild the Geary. And every day, $35 million. And every day, Alan Stein and I would go out and we'd go to people like Don Fisher at the Gap. And you had to meet him at seven in the morning. And again, nobody said, oh, you have a child. Maybe seven in the morning is not such a good time for you. Nobody cared. You had to pretend you didn't have a child. And you turn up there and he'd say, after taking the meeting, I don't want to give you any money. I hate the theater. I'd go to bed at nine at night. And Alan Stein would say, well, we do matinees. It was so sweet. It was really hard. And the staff was very beaten down because Bill Ball had killed himself. I don't know if you know the whole history, but ACT had gone through terrible trauma. I never knew Bill Ball, but he had left under a cloud because he'd embezzled the Rockefeller grant and put it into gold bullion. And then he staged the crucifixion and said he was leaving the Pasha Blade. He went to LA and then he killed himself. And then a Hastings lovely man ran up for a while. And it was really traumatic. By the time I came, the whole staff was beaten down and traumatized. And they wouldn't look you in the eye about anything, whatever you asked, they'd look away like this, you know. And so it was incredibly lonely. And we were bankrupt, had no money. I had no idea. You know, I'd run a theater under a million dollars. And ACT was a 12 million dollar theater when I came and a 24 million dollar theater when I left. And so it was a really steep learning curve. It was very lonely. And there were very few people I could call to say, what do I do? You know, I always did have this brilliant mother. I always had a working mother. And that was incredible. You know, I would take my daughter to the JCC and she'd come home with a hostile note saying, please don't ever send her again with a ham sandwich or something like that. I always failed. And then I would call her weeping and say I'm supposed to be there Friday for Shabbat and I'm in rehearsal and she'd say, darling, just tell them you don't compete on that level. So anytime anything like that came up, I'd say, I don't compete on that level. But you know, I had no maternity leave. I brought Nick to the board meeting. I was nursing him because that's what it was. They never gave I never had five minutes off ever. And so now finally, we're having all these conversations about workplace abuse or let us say what it is to be parents in the workplace or women or it didn't occur to me that I had any recourse when they wrote about me that way or they called me that the board meeting the little lady or they assumed I couldn't read a balance sheet or you know, I never had that in the rehearsal room, I have to say there were almost no occasions, a few but very few where I felt that I was being disdained in the rehearsal room as a woman. Even the very old actors, Bill Patterson, there were some old were wonderful Sidney Walker who was you know, dying and 85 by the time I got there, they were wonderful and kind to me and the stage crew taught me everything. I'd never worked in a proscenium theater. I'd been downtown, I was, I never went above 14th Street in New York. I went to LaMama, the public, PS 122, you know, and CSC. So I'd never worked in a proscenium and I'd never worked in a union house and ACT is a Lord A all union theater and I had to learn how to be on the clock and they were wonderful to me, the crew, you know, they taught me, they knew they had to, I mean they knew and but I was a quick study, you know, I learned fast, I love to learn. It got better. I have a great husband, that's it also. I have an unbelievable husband, he cooked every meal, you know, he laughed and didn't care about my bad reviews, he was amazing. Incredible, really interesting. What it takes anyway, even in our days, but what it was, what it meant at the time when you were a pioneer in that sense, first woman, hired to run such a theater and as they say, pioneers are the ones who get arrows in the back, you know, that's what happens and you have those wounds and I'm sure this scars us there. When you confronted these crises, what kept you running, what made you do what you did? I mean in an odd way, I am very idealistic and I think it's why when I went back and read that Eva Ligallian biography, I literally was weeping as I read it. I felt for her so deeply because you know, in spite of everything she was up against, she sort of believed that you know, doing a great production of Ibsen's ghosts with the young Rosemary Harris as Regina was worth it, you know, and I always felt that I sort of, you know, you gave in your introduction, I was weaned on, I lived around the corner from La Mama, so what did I see in my early 20s? Cantor, I saw the dead class five times, Villa Paule, Villa Paule, Georgia Strayler, everything, Ellen, I just trusted Ellen Stewart, if she said go see it, I went to see it, you know, all of Joe Pap stuff, so I was weaned in a period of much fiercer leadership. Those people were fierce, they didn't care what anybody thought, they knew what they valued, and at the core, they cared about things I care about like, I believe in acting companies. I don't know why we've gotten rid of this, I don't know why we don't understand. Do you know that a jazz ensemble could never play well together unless they always played together, and a dance company is better when the dancers dance together in an orchestra and a hip-hop group, but in theater, we just treat it as what Zelda called peace work. And so how can it ever get better? Do you know what I mean? So I'm a passionate believer in acting companies and long-term collaborations, and I come from a dance background, originally I danced all my young life, so I'm interested in movement theater, and I wasn't, I've never been interested in kind of didactic American drama. In fact, I never did much American, you know, I'm embarrassed to tell you, Frank, I'm very old now, I have never directed Arthur Miller, never. I had no interest, that wasn't my kind of theater, and I thought everybody else is doing it, he's not going to disappear, I'm sure he's a great writer, I don't want to do it, you know, and so I always loved the work, I still love the work. I spent Monday in New York with John Douglas Thompson, who's going to do Oedipus for me, and my Greek teacher from 40 years ago, Helena Foley, working on Oedipus, and I thought it doesn't get better than that, you know, and so in the horrible times, the work always saved me, going back into rehearsal, just reconnecting, I'm, I revere actors, I've never been an actor, I couldn't be an actor, but I revere actors, I'm, and I love to teach, and ACT was always a school, and I've still been teaching during COVID online a lot, so that kind of got me through, you know, like in 2008, when everything, the bottom fell out and we had no money and no subscribers to know anything, I thought, well, theater is very ancient, if it has to get much smaller again, it will, which I think is what's going to happen right now, it should get much more local again, which I also believe, I've spent my whole career railing against the commercial theater in Broadway, which I think has destroyed American theater, and I still think that, and I'll never win that battle, but I'm very contentious, so that keeps me going, sometimes outrage keeps me going, but I don't know, I just, I haven't given up, I love the people, I love the engagement with people who fall in love with it, I love the fact that you can go around the world and be in a room with people whose language you don't speak and you're the same tribe. Yeah, it's something, something unique and something I think in a way we missed. In a way, of course, it is a time of change, we are so close, we don't really know how significant it will be or not, if it's impossible, as you know, Hannah Muller, the great playwright once, you know, we were talking, he said, you know, if you want to know what happened December 17th, 1925, it's completely clear, we know exactly what was important that day and whatnot, but on the day nobody had any idea. What do you see for theater? Is it a time, will things change, have they changed, or is it like let's go back to Michael Jackson on Broadway? Isn't that depressing? I don't think we're going to know for another couple of years, this has been an incredibly profound time, and as you said in your introduction, you know, because we were all thrown back on ourselves, which we're not always so eager to be in the theater, we're a very communal art form. But even when you watch people like, you know, Robert Wilson or, I don't know, Meredith Monk being alone, that's a really profound thing and you're left to your own inner life to think, what do I care about? How do I live with myself? And I don't think that will go away, we've done a deep dive into ourselves, and we've seen things we like and seen things we don't like. I think in the short term, it is depressing to look at a lot of these theater announcements. I wouldn't ever want to see any of those shows again, and I think that's what we're seeing first. And I think what we've done is shuffle the deck, and we have some new leadership in positions, which is great, often leaders of color, but the structures of the theater haven't changed. And I think that's going to be a huge problem. Even way before COVID, we in the nonprofit theater had crashed into the wall of impossibility, right? We had all grown these enormous organizations, which we expected to be professional and have huge staffs and subscription bases. And those days were over, you know, ACT was built when the Ford Foundation and the Rockefeller wanted to pay people to have acting companies and do complex large-scale theater. That's over. And it's never coming back, and we're not going to have a culture czar. This is never going to be a country that I don't think that has huge federal subsidy for the arts, because it's too contentious. We've never believed in the arts. We're a Puritan country, we were founded by people fleeing theater in England and things like that. So we're going to have to find a new model that is non-commercial for making theater. And I don't know what it is. One model that interests me is what Nick Starr and Nick Heitner did with the Bridge Theater in London, which is neither a nonprofit nor a commercial theater. It's this sort of odd hybrid, and it's kind of very brilliant. I thought people here during COVID would start talking about that. How about that model? Well, I mean, those two men are just geniuses, and mainly Nick Heitner wanted to keep directing Interesting Place, and Nick Starr was really tired of the board model. I mean, the problem with the board that you have to report to and bow down to, and I say this with love in my heart, Frank, because I had incredible trustees at ACT that saved my life, and I know there are visionary and kind and generous trustees all around America, but the model that says that our industry, the artistry, the decisions, the leadership in our field is determined by people who have nothing to do with our field and know nothing about it, right? Who are hedge fund managers or lawyers or whatever. It's preposterous. I mean, if you actually really think about it, what is it that they are being trusted to do? And yet you are, when you're in a theater, completely beholden to that group of people. So what is the alternative? Why are you? Because they're the people that write the checks, and I am not a verse. I have raised hundreds of millions of dollars in my career, alas. I'm a really good fundraiser, and I've spent my life fundraising, but I think that model is problematic. I think one of the things we're facing right now is a time of real temerousness in leadership. Everyone has to write the same statement, say the same things, announce the same pronouns, adhere to the same principles, so it's incredibly difficult to actually figure out what's the difference between any of these theaters. What do these people actually believe in? And what I would like to see is that theaters stop looking to New York, stop trying to move to Broadway, stop worrying about whether the New York Times is reviewing them, stop trying to do enhanced Broadway musicals in their theaters, in wherever they are around the country, and actually think, what would it take to make this organization matter to this place, to these people who live here? And what would it take to get artists to move here or live here and hire artists who are in the community? And one of the things I think about the Zoom revolution is it has shown us, we can work with artists all over the world. We don't always have to get on a plane and fly to where the reading is happening in San Francisco or Oklahoma or wherever. And I think that's a great thing. It's a good thing for the climate. It's a good thing for the arts. But I hope we, I think we're going to get much smaller again and more local. At least I hope that's what happens. And that maybe then we are funded by in smaller increments by the people who are actually part of our own communities. But I think it's going to take a long time. Yeah, and often artists are also not board members, right? Never, Frank. This is what I'm saying. I wrote an essay the first month of COVID for the Clyde Fitz report, which was about that. The first people to get fired during Dickett furloughed laid off. The minute the pandemic hit were all the artists. So every theater paid out two weeks of contract. And then they kept on their development staff or their marketing staff. But the artists were basically let go. Then a few theaters that were really committed to digital work, Irish rep, the little theaters, the roundhouse in DC. I mean, there's been some amazing work at much smaller theaters. San Francisco Playhouse here in San Francisco to try and keep artists employed. But for the most part, my freelance friends, I have three lighting designers who are working 40 hours a week at a liquor store. I have a dramaturge I'm working with in in Ashland and her husband's working at a grocery store. He's a sound designer. I mean, what are freelance artists supposed to do? You know, the theater's got PPP to keep going. But these artists didn't get it. None of us got it. All of us in my union, the director's union lost our health care, everybody, because there weren't contracts. I mean, that's so what kind of industry is it in which your frontline workers, who are your artists, are the ones who are totally expendable? And we're just supposed to be sitting waiting to be rehired, you know, when things reopen. And that is not sustainable. Yeah. And also, it's not a poor industry. If you believe in that commercial way, I think Broadway makes five, six billion a year. The Lion King has made, I think, seven or eight billion dollars more than any film Disney has ever done in their 100-year history. And what did they do for you, the artists? You know, what did they do for Broadway? What did they give out food, meals? Did they give out masks? Did they engage with the community? It's empty. It's wrong. Like Abhishek said, when we talk from India, who said, you know, everybody in India has money. They, in their private jets, they flew to London. That was their reaction to the COVID crisis. And this is the same. And it is so wrong and things, in a way, have to change. I think in Germany and in other countries, it's the national health insurance for artists. They pay much less according to how much they really make, but it's being recognized and they make a very significant contribution and cannot also be measured. It's about value. How much is it valued, you know? And I think New Zealand is trying to do that. My ministry said, how much is it worth? As I say, you know, I think in this country, I think there are many individuals around America who actually do care and do go to the theater. And Hallie Flanagan proved it, right? When she started the Federal Theater Project and went around America. But here's something that really woke me up, Frank. During the pandemic, for example, small restaurants around the country were all closing. And in their communities, whether it was in Texas or Florida or Ohio or Idaho, whatever, people said, no, no, no, that's our, that's our local steakhouse. That's our sushi bar. That's our hamburger joint. We can't let them die. And they sort of banded together to really help lobby for support for restaurants. Why did this not happen for theater? I mean, Chuck Schumer allied with the kind of Broadway League because that's about business. So you have to get Broadway open so you get international tourists to come back. But it really struck me that around the country, we didn't have, and this is our fault. This is on us as theater people. Why are we so disconnected or so elite or so coastal or so arrogant or so something disconnected that people around the country didn't feel compelled to fight for us? That's all I wanted when I ran ACT. I wanted this community. I was a citizen in this community. Do you know, my children grew up in this community. I, my husband's a small lawyer representing people in this community. I wanted people to feel I was part of this universe. I shopped with them. I lived with them. I, whatever, they told me when they hated the place. They told me when they loved it. They told me what they wanted to see. And that was the most gratifying thing. I don't know. Are they fighting for, for that theater now? I mean, what can we do as artists to stop telling people what to do, which we're very good at, but inviting people to think wherever they live in small towns, that they're part, that we're part of their lives. That's the revolution that has to happen that broadens the base of theater going for across the board. And I think it's been fantastic that we're talking about diversity in the theater now, but it can't just be a certain kind of diversity. Like we can't reject everybody over 70 because we're not interested in old people, for example, because old people carry the wisdom of this culture and they are part of our theater going audience. So what does that mean? Or rural communities or communities that don't believe what we believe? And I hope that one of the things that happens during, as we reopen, is that these extreme polarizations that have happened in this country start to kind of, I mean, maybe this is totally Pollyanna-ish and I'm wrong, but start to kind of moderate again and that we stop being so sure that we're right. Yeah, that's true. As someone said, there are only two opinions, my opinions and the wrong opinion, and something has happened. And I like that you said, it's also our fault. What has happened? I listened yesterday, there was a monologue about Lin Festrieder of Arne Fugelsang, where it was very funny. He actually was from the free theater, kind of, you know, we're also, we talked about, came from the great Hall's theater. He said, I gave up. I felt we were not reaching the people. If we were really honest, we told them something, we thought we were better. And first of all, he said, well, theater is like this, like this, it's just in a room, but with less people. And it's still not interactive. He said, you know, and he had a very long one about climate change, what's coming. He said, all the animals that are dying, they won't come back. The coral reefs, the rising of the temperature of the Earth. So he says, I'm going to be journalist now. I redo things. And in one of the reasons, he also said, because, you know, normal people when they hear theater, he said, no, the average, they all, I don't know, I'm not sure if I'm going to go. And he said, he couldn't fight it. And now he tries to digitally, but of course, secretly loves theater and does it. We all know that. But the big question he said, you know, what do we really do? Is it okay to see a Michael Jackson Broadway musical in a time of corona when people are dying and the Earth, as far as we know? I think people should put their money where their mouth is. If you want to spend $250 to see Broadway crap, that I guess that's your business. But, you know, people can choose where they want to put their time and energy. And I think it goes back to what we were talking about at the beginning of our conversation, Frank, about the past. You know, I think I have a great reverence, for instance, for the people on whose shoulders I stand. And I think because I come from the family I come from, I was really taught to revere my elders, you know? And that doesn't mean you do it the way they do it or you always value what they value. But I think that my real passion right now is to say theater from the past great classical theater has to be kept alive. One of the great democratizing things across America in the last hundred years has been Shakespeare festivals, outdoors everywhere. And now we're being told Shakespeare is heteronormative colonials, cisgender, you know, patriarchal, terrible. And it can be all of those things. And you can deconstruct it and hate what you want to hate. But the fact is, it is among the greatest literature, the most human, the most complex, the most illuminating, you never get to the bottom of it. And I feel that way about the Greeks, you know, when you talk about climate, I've been working on Oedipus at Colonus, you know, which is a play about kind of how we've destroyed the earth and what, and that the only way things are going to change is the earth that's going to open up and kind of re-embrace us. And we're going to have to form some other bond with nature instead of battling it like Oedipus. And we were not sideways working on on Colonus, just even when this is with Seattle Rep, just even online. And I thought, what a tragedy. It's like tearing down every statue because you don't like what the person stood for. What does that I mean, obviously, I'm for tearing down the confederate statues, etc. But you know, when you start saying all the work from the past is a legacy that has to be destroyed, then I wonder, you know, how do we live in the present without ever, without, without that fertile interaction, even if what you want to do is deconstructive, which is what everybody's been doing with the Greeks since they started, right? Everybody. I just did a comtoid bean version of Antigone called Pale Sister in Dublin, which is about his mani. It's about what if, what if resistance isn't violent and front footed, but silent and negotiated? It's a really interesting question. People will always be returning to those archetypes. And I think we have to fight for that. I think it's really wrong to say, you know, if we don't agree with everything about the past or it isn't perfect or it harbors ugly secrets that we should bury it. I think on the contrary, we should expose it and wrestle with it and engage with it and that the best thing we can do as theater artists is always work on material that's bigger than we are, work with artists who are better than we are, you know, doing material that's more complicated than we are. If it's a play that points a finger and tells you what to think, then in two weeks of rehearsal, you're bored because you know, and the audience gets it and goes home and feels virtuous and then what? What do you get? It's so much more interesting when it's something that is, you know, that is not resolved. And so that makes me very sad about the American theater right now because the classical tradition is over. I don't see anybody doing check of, I mean, Shakespeare maybe, but you know, the Jacobians or the Greeks or non-Western classics, which we did a lot of at ACT. We did the orphanage, I worked on Shakuntala. I mean, so did Bill Rouch at OSF. You know, lots of people exploring amazing literature from around the world and I hope that happens because I think otherwise we're just doomed to be a very trivial short-term culture that is only interested in what's in our Twitter feed today and that is so boring. I think theater has to be the antidote to that. That's my screen. It's a very significant statement. I also believe, I think, what Hans-Tisleiman said who writes about theater, the post-traumatic, he said theater is a house and it has many rooms and they all exist next to each other in a way like a museum where you have different centuries, but there's also contemporary art that happens now and we have to take it serious. There's even a room for Broadway. There's nothing against it, but it can dominate the dominating one. It can't be the one, but people identify as the only room in that great museum. I'll tell you something that was a metaphor for me in New York this weekend that gave me great hope. I went to the Frick Madison. I don't know if you've been back or have you seen if you've seen that, but it's so astonishing. They've taken all of those stunningly beautiful paintings from the Frick, which were surrounded by vases and chuchkas and beautiful period furniture and putting put over a fireplace and things like that, and they have put it in the Breuer in this brutalist building, stunning piece of architecture for which these paintings were never designed. Xavier Salamone and Amy Ning, the curators, who I think are, they've been my hero heroines during COVID because they do cocktails with the curator every Friday, which I highly recommend. It's brilliant, almost as good as the seagull talks with Frank Henscher, but anyway, those are the two things that kept me going during COVID. You and Xavier Salamone, and he hung these paintings, Frank. So you see, for example, the Bellini Saint Francis, this mystical, strange religious painting that has a trapezoidal bar of light behind Saint Francis, and they put it in a room in the Breuer that has that trapezoidal window, do you know what I mean? Facing north and a bench, and it's a little room, and suddenly seeing that painting, it's like being in a shrine. You feel like you're sitting, it's like a religious experience, and that is the very modern colliding with the old in a way that honors both, so they don't comment on it. And this is done over and over again at the New Hang at the Frick Madison, where they'll take a painting you think you knew, and they'll put it in a context where you suddenly see it again as if for the first time. It's like watching a classical play in modern dresser in a different setting, and what it shows you is that's the muscle that makes theater, or that makes any great art, the relationship of the very radical to the traditional, and you can't make something radical. It's like William Carlos Williams said, you know, free versus playing tennis with the net down. So first you have to know how to play tennis with a net, and then you take the net down, and it's sort of thrilling. But if you're only ever learned to play with the net down, it's sometimes not that interesting. So when I stood in the Frick Madison, I thought that's what it is, this really daring collision of the absolutely now and the strangely antique, and what that tells us about humanity. And I know, as I said, it's not fashionable to say there are universal human values, but that's what you feel when you see that, that there are things that deeply sustain about everything about politics and justice and gender and enslavement. And there are, you know, things that's why I always go back to the Greeks, because every time I ever wrestle with any profound issue in the world, it's all there. Imperialism, war, PTSD, as Brian Dorries has showed us with the theater of war, it's all in the Greeks. And I hope in some way, in a very contemporary way, that younger artists will go back to that. But that also means we have to think about what is actor training, how do you access it, how do you not make actor training elite and expensive and forbidden to people, but encourage people to learn it as an art form. These are all big questions that I think will change. I mean, I think the reckoning has brought about a great awareness in who gets to be in the American theater and who doesn't get to be in it. We're a very class based culture. You have to have a fancy MFA now from a fancy graduate school and many people can't afford that. And I wonder if we shouldn't think of a very different way to train actors and train theater people, go back to an apprenticeship or some kind of paid like a craft where you learn it from somebody who knows it. So I think they're really exciting possibilities for very radical change in how we make work. And I just hope we dare to do it. And we don't let this moment make us timorous. Yeah, that is so true. I think and Katania went to see also one of the great, also women working with the assets of Melinda Joseph or Morgan Jones. Oh, well Melanie, you know, Melanie was like my soulmate when I first moved to New York. So when I saw her on your show, you know, and I thought about what she created, Frank, the Foundry Theater. What an amazing contribution to the American theater. What a radical, incredible way of thinking about how to make theater and then how to end the theater when you're ready to say that chapter's over. Who else has been that brave? Except her. That's true, like a rock band that plays together like a Pettismas who said who pulled off, she did the death of the rock star, but she didn't have to die. And actually, and but it's true. I think also what you say about the what has to become and Katania spoke about black playwrights or so many playwrights at the time she was in contact with and nobody had gone to school to writing school. You went to Reddit, right? They all came out like an August Wilson. They came out, you know, of an engagement with writing doesn't exist in that way anymore. But you know, in the early days, this is why I wanted to work with Irene Fornes. I mean, if you look at the generation of Hispanic playwrights like Jose Rivera, Milo Cruz, they learned at the feet of Irene. I mean, she was the great teacher and she taught, you know, there were incredible teachers happening. It just wasn't always in formalized settings or graduate schools. But I feel like, you know, the mentorship that happened. I mean, Sam Bollins, it happened among black playwrights over generations for sure. And with women, I think there have been really interesting. I one of my closest colleagues in California is Philip Kanga Tanda, Japanese American playwright, and he and David Henry Wong, whom I went to college with were the first Asian American playwrights and the generations of people that Philip has taught nurtured. He's a professor at Berkeley now. You know, I think actually that that tradition is very, is very robust. It hasn't always been, as I say, in a formalized context. But if you look at the generations, you can see what it's tied to. And again, you know, Philip has slightly been forgotten now. And I always want to say to people, but that's where it started, you know. And it's exciting that he's here. I live in a very Asian American city. So that's the work I was excited about doing and Asian work, you know. I mean, the other thing Franco would say about what you've done on this, on these seagull talks, that it is so important is to remind us that we sit in a global theater community. And I don't know why we've been so little interested in that in America. I think we think everyone speaks English and we're, and we just, I don't know why we've never been more, except in the 60s, more interested. And bam, when you had Joe Malillo on that was amazing. You know, our Bonnie Marenca has, but, but I mean, we have to be interested in the work that's being made around the world. Why do we know so little about it? There's no excuse anymore. We're all on Zoom. We're all online. How is it that, that we know so little? And wouldn't it make us feel less alone and lonely and despairing if we actually knew that people in India and Brazil and Sri Lanka were thinking the same things we were thinking and trying to work in new ways the way we are. And so, you know, again, I think the Zoom legacy is going to be strong there that we figured out we can actually communicate that way. I'm still in really close Zoom touch with all the people I just worked with in Ireland and I wouldn't have been before, but we've been doing readings together or looking at visual material together. And I don't think we would have done that in the same way. I've watched all of Gary Hine's work for Druid. I don't know if you've seen any of it, but she did a cherry orchid that was brilliant. She just did a thing on the poet of Ann Boland and, you know, I wouldn't have known a year ago where to look. So that I also think, you know, why are we so obsessively myopically focused on Broadway? There's much more interesting stuff happening at lots of other places, you know. And again, it goes back to the press. You know, our press is not interested. Nothing gets covered unless it's going to come to New York. Yeah, yeah. And then often it is connected to, you know, advertising big pages bought and it also gets reviewed and the real estate of theater reviews get smaller and smaller. So we'll actually have to move online like Jonathan Cowell from many, many others. Yeah, yeah. Hawkeyes, as you said, Bonnie Morancas, PHA, that's a long lasting engagement. But it also, she complains, she said, the old days everybody wanted to write something discussed, had articles, founded magazines, you know, we, like the Amazons, you know, have been taken over. I just read two days ago, Just Kill Me, it's the oral history of Pangolipang coming out. It is impressive. It's sad how it all collapsed, but the beauty and the Ramones who kind of knew three, four chords and they didn't, they were hiring a new bass player and he couldn't even do the simple E and they said, doesn't matter. You just learn it. It's good enough what you have and then you go on. Yeah, yeah, yeah. They have never seen, you know, an M or something their first concert they did. They hadn't, what you said when I came there, I didn't know about Brazilian stage. And I think this is something that is important that you do not need to go through years and training in society as Susan Sontek kisses you on the forehead and then you say, okay, I can do something. You have to work. I hope this will come out of it. And yeah, so my question to you, let's say you would be again 26, you would be hired by ACT. What would you tell the mayor and the board to change? And what would you do right now if you say, I'll start August 1st? I think I would try and do some kind of ritual on the roof. ACT has a fantastic roof and we used to go up there in the days when people smoked because, you know, they'd be in costume and there were funny stories where the door would lock and they'd miss their entrance because they were on the roof and of course it smoking. I never smoked because my dad was a cardiologist, but I kept thinking that I never smoked, but I am, I'm glad I never smoked because I'm sort of compulsive and I would never have stopped. But I would love to see, I like, I think I would do, God, what would I do? I would do some kind of like, like the baka. Well, I'll tell you what I really want to do. I want to do an outdoor production of the baka. This is what I've been working with the San Francisco Girls Chorus. I went 300 girls to sing the main ads. I want Joanna Haygood, who runs Zaco Dance, which is an aerial dance company in the Bayview District, to help me figure out how to how to repel BD Wang was my was my Dionysus on doing this here, down the back of the Legion of Honor. I've been doing this with the museum here. And I want to do this ritual. The baka is the play to do right now because it's a play about extremity and polarization and belief and the power of theater and the destructive power and do it in some citywide way where I use every group I can think of. So during COVID, I've been trying to connect with like, I've been working with the Girls Chorus, I've been working with Zaco Dance, I've been working with the museum, all these groups that never work together to say, is there a way we could do this? And I think that's what I would start with. Who are the groups that represent very different constituents? And particularly, who are the groups that work with teenagers who are our future? I have big hopes like these girls who sing for the Girls Chorus that they're going to learn how to work together, even though they're such different people and that's such a great metaphor. Carl's singing is always a great metaphor. And see, could we make a piece of ancient theater for very young people and for communities who didn't know it and do it on the roof of the Geary or do it behind in the golf course behind the Legion of Honor? I would love to see that. I would love to see some permanent, I would do a permanent company again. Whoever lived in San Francisco who was willing to say, this is my home, I live here, I did this for years, but I couldn't afford it. It's too expensive, actors can't live here, I paid them 52 weeks a year, they taught, they directed, they acted, they got to help choose the plays. I think that's what should happen. I think artists should be running these organizations. The more artists you put on the payroll, the better. And then I'd have to figure out, does everybody like, not like a subscription, but does everybody throw down like a GoFundMe, like a little money in the bank and then a piece of that production is theirs? What does that look like? I think there's an investment model in the arts that we haven't thought of yet or we're not widely thinking of yet, but I bet you this generation will. They're brilliant. I mean, this generation is brilliant itself producing, brilliant itself funding. They know how to go online and raise money for things they care about. That's going to happen in the theater. It is happening all over the place. It's happening in film. And so more people will sort of feel ownership of it. And the other thing I would say is more people have to watch the creative process. We have to demystify that. I used to think the rehearsal room was sacred and no one should ever be allowed in. And now I've been doing these open rehearsals online. I'm doing one Saturday on Oedipus for the Fine Arts Museum because I think people have to understand what the craft is. You know, Frank, nobody knows what a director does. They sort of get what actors do, but they think it's typecasting. So if you're beautiful, you know, you get to play whatever roles, but the whole notion of transformation, of spatial use, of music, of sound, of, you know, how's anyone to know unless they see it? So I think open rehearsals, ways that people can actually watch music get made, like David Lange has been doing on the High Line or Julia Wolf's been doing all the bang and a can stuff this year online has been so brilliant is going to make people feel like the arts is both more accessible, but also slightly more sacred, you know, that it isn't that anybody can do it. It is a great craft. There are people who've devoted their lives to it. It does take training and vision, passion, resilience, consistency. And I wish people thought of us the way they thought about athletes, you know, will revere athletes. They understand it takes years and lifetimes to get ready. Why don't they see that about theater workers, you know, that we are that's our devotion. And I think it's because they it's too remote to them. And it's not about content. I don't think the solution is to say every play has to be about social justice in a very literal, contemporary way. That is dealt with much better in journalism. I think it's about waking people's imaginations up to to defamiliarize the world, which is an immersive active thing that happens in the theater, and is a very hard thing to do. And that's the thing that I wish, you know, just like we love great chefs and stuff that people thought, oh, that is a gift that artists have that I would like to know more about. These are such such significant points, alternative financial models outdoors on the roofs, rediscovering the stories we have, but also myths from all around the world and collaboration, unusual combination of things. So it's a lot can be done and and should be done. And I think we just got a little glimpse into your your thinking. I think also, to start somewhere, you know, it doesn't have to be perfect. But, you know, as you said, over time, you develop a craft. You know, if you watch a baseball game, you have never seen one, you don't know the rules. It's the most boring thing in the world for 10, 20 years. And people from, you know, half a mile away will say this was a knuckleball, as you know, and they bought a great thing to see. So in a way, theater also has both immediate, but it also, you know, slowly builds up and why do we. And I know this about company, Frank, you know, this is why I'm so mystified. I mean, we're such a celebrity culture, we only want to see, we think famous people. But what I learned when we had a company at ACT and Bill Ball did this brilliantly, brilliantly. Or for instance, I work at the Stratford Festival a lot, which I think is one of the great, great theaters in North America. And people will drive across the border from Detroit, Buffalo, whatever to see what Shauna McKenna is doing that summer, you know, because they've seen her for 40 years, Grant Wing Davies, Lucy Peacock, Martha Henry, who's 85 and still going strong, Andre Sills. You know, there are these amazing actors. And they, and what I love about the Stratford audience is they're willing to go see John Gabriel Borkman, who knows, except Ibsen aficionados, what that play is, but they were willing to go because it was Scott Wentworth, Lucy Peacock and Shauna McKenna. And this young, brilliant black actor Sophie Walker, whom they loved. And so, you know, that was my private lives. But anyway, they were willing because they trusted the actors. And it's just like going to a sports event, right? Or ballet, you go to see the dancer. So you'll go see six different Swan Lakes, because you want to see six different dancers. I think we're really missing the boat in the theater. I think people do adopt artists. They want to see the same artist again. It's like family. You know, it's why we binge watched, you know, le bureau or something on Netflix, because you want to see those actors over and over again. And I think we're missing a big chance. You know, when we all used to go to Mabu Mines, it was sort of a joke that we would wait to see whether Joanne had gotten Fred Newman to cut his hair, right? You know, or whatever. Joe Pap was brilliant about this. I mean, he put, you know, you get to see what is Raul Julia going to do this summer? Is it going to be Mac the Knifer? Is it going to be a Shakespeare? You know. And then you also understand what theater is, which is transformation. It isn't television. It's not watching somebody play what they are, what they look like. It's watching an actor imagine their way into something else. And only company shows you that. So again, I know nobody's talking about this, right? Or I haven't heard enough of people talking about it. But I think that would make a huge difference and that communities could adopt acting companies as part of their community and citizenship. And the village helps raise the children and they go see the theater. And I think it would make everybody feel, you know, my children grew up at ACT. My son learned to walk down the aisles of the Geary. My daughter is a brilliant litigator. And it's because she had to stand up at donor dinners and say who she was. You know, they grew up that way. And it's a good village theater. And more people should be part of it. It should be. And also trust an audience, the great Tanya Bruguera, one of the leading visual artists in the world from Cuba. Yes. I'm going to do a bright play because in my world where I move, people come look at the installation for a couple of minutes and shock them. And then move on to the next thing. And she said, and in theater, it's incredible. People know the story. They already know the outcome. They might even know the line. And they sit for two hours in a chair without moving to see your choice and to think about it and to reflect. That's right. Miraculous. And it's also something we can move forward. And your idea, look at the process, open it up. Don't be afraid. George Tabori, great Hungarian director. Even, you know, my shows, I have to end my rehearsals and have to show it. It's in a way still part of my rehearsal is, I have, they told me I cannot, I don't have, we don't have enough money to go further on. So why not being open of it? And then people like, like to see this. So this is also important and significant. What do you say? I hope people will also, you know, listen to it and take it here. What do you say? It's very serious. It's very significant. And you also have a whole life behind it, a whole legacy of work to prove it. Well, you know, it's very weird about legacy. Frank, you know, I, in some ways, I was so sad when I left ACT because I thought no matter what, a lot of what I cared about is necessarily going to disappear. And I'm sure Joanne felt that when she left the public or the brilliant and Bogart, you know, is now winding down city theater. And so legacy is a weird thing. And what you, in some way, we have to accept the evanescence of our art form, which is a very hard thing to accept. I always wept on opening nights. I hated opening nights because it was the end of the process. And Marco Barattella used to make fun of me and say, oh, pearl off, let it go. We finished rehearsal. You know, but I think there is something evanescent in where it lives is in the bodies of the people who experienced it and the traces that are left, as Bonnie Marenka said, in the writing about it. And when I listened to Laurie Anderson's Norton talks, I don't know if you listen this year on Zoom, she did one called Rocks. And it was about writing and tablets being broken. And she talked about the white fire and the black fire. So the black fire is the Torah, you know, is the text. And that's what remains. And you can read it and see it and interpret it. So that's publishing plays, writing about plays, remembering what we do through writing. But the white fire is the empty space, the margins where we've been silent, what's hiding. And we don't know how the white fire gets passed along, but it's in our bodies. It's in the bodies of everyone who experienced it or felt it or acted in it. And somehow that's the weird inchoate legacy that, you know, I feel when I think about the art I've seen that's mattered to me. And that makes me let go of, you know, if people forget, they forget, we did what we did. And traces of it will remain in the snow and the rest disappears. And that has to be okay. That's true. It's almost and I call Valentin the comedian of the time of great study. It's like a snowman from last year. You might still have the carrot and the photo. And but that's also what's so great about it. And the white space also is to Claude Regis, the great French director who said, you look at the letters as you said the black ones, but there's also space in between. What's the white reminds me what he said? What if you work on the text as the director, look also at the space between the letters. It's important. And you know, it is the thing I learned from Pinter, you know, that as rigorous and incredible and funny and brilliant as the language is, it's such a cliche to say it by now because we just mock the Pinter pause. But the silences in his plays are so epic and so brilliantly crafted. And, you know, I was just writing a chapter about the birthday party and there's a moment in the darkness at the top of act two, where it's silent. And then you hear this sound. And the sound is this. You don't know what it is. And you just keep hearing this. And then the lights come up and it's McCann tearing up a newspaper into strips. And it goes on and on and on till he has five perfectly equal strips. And you think, What does that mean? And as Michael Billington said, in Pinter, you're not trying to figure out what's going to happen. You're trying to figure out how is it happening right now? Because there's something in that silence, that sound of the paper goes through you. And you realize it's about a person about to be destroyed. And so, you know, what I learned about directing, Pinter was to completely trust that even before you knew what would fill the silence or the pause, you had to hold it like a piece of music. And it would hold eventually. Because in the silence is the humanity of everybody in the theater breathing. You know, when I just went to Nam June Pike's show at SF MoMA that showed John Cage's first public performance of four minutes 33 seconds. What's so beautiful is looking at Cage's face smiling at the piano, listening to New York. Just listening, listening to everybody standing there coming and going, talking to each other, sneezing, not sneezing, children, crying, dogs, traffic, and how he reveled in the longer the silence went on, the more, you know, Cage always said, if it's boring, let it go on longer. And then it'll finally be interesting. I think that's true. And that maybe after COVID we're going to be less frightened of silence. Yeah. Yeah. And what does the silence on the stages now, all these stages, silent. What does it really mean? It's incredible, really. Thank you for sharing time for being with us. I know you're busy being in. It's a big honor for us to have you with us. It's important. What you have done is important. What you're doing. And it's important what you will be doing, but also what you said, and it does have an impact. And it's a great contribution to our choice. Really, really, thank you. And also listeners to take the time. It went a little bit over time, but I saw there was energy and how long songs go when you compose them. Tomorrow we have also a significant artist of a significant country in a significant time. It's Marco Layera from Chile. He's here with us with Martin Valdez-Stauber, who is his drummer, who somehow was from the back of my days working in Germany. And in Chile, something incredible happened a couple of days ago. Finally, in elections, the right wing government lost very, very big time. 115 people will rewrite the constitution in Chile. It's the first moment, perhaps, since the Allende government, that there is some hope. Only last December, demonstrators got shot in the eyes by police when about 800 of them intentionally were under curfew. Then Corona happened. They were under curfew. Again, women went out, a million of them, to change the world, to ask for a new constitution. So something stunning happening. We don't hear a lot about it. And Marco has worked a lot, what it means, what does democracy mean, what does the artistic engagement mean in the times we live in, and what might happen if you have the chance to do what you want. And now all of a sudden, this has happened. So it's going to be a very interesting discussion. I hope you can join. And also, we're going to go on. And for next week, again, Hal-Ram, thank you for being so kind and generous for hosting us. And again, Kerry, I hope it was as inspiring as it was for us. I truly have to thank you and Andy and your team at CUNY and Hal-Ram. Because, Frank, I've been obsessed with these talks now for 18 months. I've been watching these at 9 a.m. in San Francisco with my morning coffee. You have brought the world to us. I'm going to cry thinking about it. I mean, people I revere, people I didn't know, artists I wished I knew, and you'd introduced us to their practices in such a generous and open-hearted way. It's really been life-changing, and you should be saluted. This is a great achievement, what you've done in COVID. So thank you. Thank you for having me. You're unique right now. So thank you so much. And all the best. Really, really, thank you for being with us. And to all listeners, we know now so much content is out there. It's great that you took the time to listen. We need good theater. We need, which because what we want is really all about is the audience. People listen. It makes a difference. So it's not for us. It's actually for you. It's right there. And to think about what Kerry said about theater and about her experience of decades, and it's serious, important. It's true, honest, and also very beautiful. Okay. Bye-bye, Kerry. And thank you. To hear from Chile. It's very important tomorrow. Thank you. Bye-bye.