 So, again, thanks for coming. It was not a fantastic performance. 25 years later. And it's also beautiful to see just the streaming of the end of the videotape, these kind of cosmic rays, and that's all what we see, little specks of lights and sounds. But maybe just let's go directly to Gary. What comes to your mind when you see this? And you said you never saw the video. I don't think anybody saw it, or very few people saw it. They just made it to have a record of it. What I kept thinking is that you could shoot it on an iPhone now, and it would be a million times clearer than that. There has its own aesthetic. One of the best things that I continue to show people, even though it's something that Vincent Fremont shot for Andy Warhol in 1974 with Charles Rodell and Bridget Berlin called to fight. It was just improvisation. It was shot in a very early porta-pack, and when you see it now, you can see that when the camera pans, if it passes across a light source and this big streak just goes... I don't know. I would have... Well, I don't know. It would be nice to see it enhanced, maybe. I mean, I understand what you're saying, but I like the technology we have now a lot better than what we have then. Thanks. Greg, tell us a bit about... How did it all get together? What was the story of it? Well, Jack Smith died, and Rons was something a little more than acquaintance, not really a close friend, but enough to have visited Jack a few times and gone to some of his performances. And as he said, it was part of this whole world, but a very small world of avant-garde theater makers at the time. But Jack, at that time, was almost completely unknown, almost forgotten as he talks about in his work. If you said Jack Smith to even theater people, very few people knew who he was. So Ron wanted to do something to memorialize him. So he talked to Penny Arcade, who was the executor of the Jack Smith estate, and it came up with that tape, what's underground about marshmallows. And as Ron said, Jack Smith's performances could be up to nine hours. So the first thing was what he said. He went to Amsterdam, he was performing with the Wooster Group, and so on his off hours he took those slides. And then he came back here, and I think the first thing was, we went to the Walker Arts Center. They brought us there to work on it. So he performed the Jack Smith part. At that time it was in a big boat. We constructed this boat like a big row boat. And like in one of the movies, I think it's Alibaba, isn't it, where he goes across the Red Sea or something. Anyway, it was all this boat and there was all this treasure and all the jewels and everything, all these chests of jewels. So we did that, but I think it was about an hour then. And Ron was like, it's not enough. It needs a companion piece. So then we came up with the idea of Roy Cohn. I had been reading all this stuff about Roy Cohn. And as opposed to Jack, we wanted to do something that was opposite of Jack. Roy Cohn was very well-known. He's like Donald Trump now, and as you probably know, he was Donald Trump's mentor. He was at the post. He went out with Barbara Walters all the time. I mean, he was a big New York person, and he was very good friends with Cardinal Spellman and like Kitty, all the big people. And so anyway, it came up with the idea of Roy Cohn. And I happened to read in this biography of him about how he had made that speech he talks about. But we tried to find it. Marianne Weems was our dramaturg, and we tried to find some record, but we couldn't. So then I thought of Gary, because I admired Gary's writing so much, and I wanted to do something that was very political because Jack was like totally non-political. He never mentioned anything political. It was like he wasn't even living in our present world. He really was living in this kind of Hollywood, you know, exotica fantasy world. So then Gary started. I told him the idea like what the speech might have been like, but as a kind of satire. And Gary wrote that, and then I wanted it to match in the time, roughly. So we did a lot of editing. Gary's speech was originally much longer. But we went to Los Angeles to the Mocha Museum of Contemporary Art, and we did it there, a kind of work in progress. Also, people couldn't... I kept saying, you know, this is theater, but everyone kept thinking, oh, it's not like a regular play, so they would put it in these art spaces. So anyway, it was there at Mocha. And when we were at Mocha, Julie Lazar, who was the programmer there, hired some people, and they taped Roy Cohn part, just Roy Cohn, because Jack Smith wouldn't, just by the audio, wouldn't be enough. So, yeah, and I have copies of that, and I forget, there were some other artists too, but they had like a radio program. So anyway, we did it there, and then I think that was it, and then we did it here at the performing garage. And then subsequent to this, at the performing garage, we went on tour to Europe, and we did it in Amsterdam, in Brussels, in Berlin, in London. I think that was it. And then, less than two years later, well, Ron always wanted a film to be made of it. This Jack Smith was never recorded. What am I saying, Jack Smith? Roy Cohn. Yeah, they did the Roy Cohn, and then they sped it up. Yeah. So then it was just like, ugh. Yeah, I just remember getting... They were like, well, it can't be that long, it won't be 30 minutes. And I was like, well, I don't want to cut it. And so then they were like, well, we'll just make it faster. Well, I don't know, but the Roy Cohn part of this seemed to me kind of sped up, like part of it. This? Yeah. No, this is the real performance. Yeah. You know, they didn't... But it seemed like... I don't know. It seemed like it was... I couldn't understand. Yeah, no, he went really fast. The sound's not so great on this. Yeah, well, that's what I mean. In the theater, I think you could understand it. Yes, you could, but... Alisa, I think it's also, of course, a play of its time of the AIDS crisis. At the end, perhaps, also, of something that happened in New York. So what do you think that fits all in, and how do you see the work? Wow. That's a big question. I mean, first I just have to say how emotional it is to see Ron, you know? I just need to say that. I mean, it's just really intense and beautiful and heartbreaking and... as the piece was at the time. So this was... What year was this? 1992. So by then, you know, we're already into a kind of second phase of theater pieces dealing with AIDS. This is when I wish David Roman was here, because he's really an expert on the theater about AIDS. I mean, I miss him for other reasons, too. So I guess, you know, to make a really... to paint it with a very broad brush, because I'd say, like, early in the epidemic, we had... the things that were most visible were pretty straightforward narrative dramas, like, I guess, The Normal Heart was the first major one, sort of adjunct, proppy, powerful piece of work by Larry Kramer. And as is, William Hoffman's play, realistic drama about a man and his partner dealing with one of them dying. And by this time, 1992, it's an interesting moment. I mean, for one thing, Roy Cohn was all over in a way, and there was that Citizen Cohn, is that what it was called? That had just come out, and Angels in America came out around the same time. Exactly the same time. You know, with the Roy Cohn character. And I guess the other things that were happening around that time, Ron Athe's work, the performance work dealing with AIDS in a very different kind of way. Hot Keys had started around then. Jeff Weiss's great serial drama. That was indirectly but unmistakably dealing with AIDS in this incredible combination of cheeriness and mean-spiritedness. It was kind of great. But I think this piece may be commenting on that through these other characters. But it's interesting that he didn't want to be interviewed or made into, that he didn't want to put himself forward in that particular photographic way. Right, and I just want to say that we went to see all those plays. And as you can imagine, probably Ron wasn't too fond of them. And didn't want to make any kind of normal play about AIDS. That's not what he was interested in. So it was in some ways a reaction. Just like the work of the Wooster Group and many other people is in some ways a reaction against the regular commercial theater that was and is all around us. And yet, I wonder maybe you could talk a little bit about acting. I mean, Ron didn't work only with the Wooster Group. He worked with Mebu Mines and other projects. But I think that the nature of the performance in Roy Cone, Jack Smith is very different from the nature of the kinds of ways he would be on stage in the Wooster Group. Yeah, it was different. You know, that was a process. One of the things I remember, he didn't want to have any accents. He was very insistent, I don't want to imitate them. And at a certain point, I said, well, you just have to have the Bronx accent. You just have to for Roy Cone. I mean, it just doesn't make any sense if you don't. And so, of course, I think he gives a brilliant... As he said, he's not sound exactly like Roy Cone, but that the interior, what I noticed this time, more than sometimes other... I've only seen it one other time since 25 years ago. And what I'm so impressed by, I'm an actor myself in rehearsal right now, so I could use some of this, is his ability to instantly change from something really funny and technically brilliantly timed and everything to something deeply tragic and still and interior. But without pointing at it or how actors can be, without showing off really, except it is kind of even more showing off because it's just so virtuosic. Well, that's one of the things that's so great about the contrast and the people. Right, and then when you see that, you're like, I can't even believe it's the same person. I mean... But also that it is a very interior... You know, the Roy Cone is very interior, and maybe that's the word I was looking for in contrast to other work of Ronce that I saw over many years. And then to contrast that with the onion scene, which is a masterpiece just in and of itself, those three minutes, whatever they are. Well, the other thing is that very Woostergrove, he's actually listening to an edited tape of Jack Smith, and if you listen very closely at the very end of the piece, you hear Jack Smith's voice. And so for that part, because he wanted to do this homage to Jack, he very consciously tried to sound exactly like what was in his ear, Jack's real voice. And because he had seen his performances, his performance style was, even though it wasn't six hours long, I think it gave a good impression, like you're like, what is... Such a different attitude about time on the stage and what an actor can and can't do and all that stuff, which he just breaks every rule there, every it was. And I think he captured that so well by just, you know, it would drive me crazy, but I would just be like, he's like, no, we have to wait. And I was like, well, what are we waiting for? But my favorite is when he says, that was in the early 60s. And then you can just... He doesn't do anything, but you can just see like the whole early 60s. And then it comes back and he's so sad, it's like, oh, it's not the early 60s anymore. Could you say something about, sorry, about the pauses in Roy Cohn, those two, because I'm just thinking of what you said about the time and the tempo. Well, you know, a speech is like, I was just like enough already with Roy. And I mean, it's great, but you know, there was plus just practically for the actor is very tiring because it's so intense. And so I made those pauses and I remember, he was like, well, what am I gonna do in the pause? And I said, don't do anything. And I used the image of Greta Garbo at the end of Queen Christina, where she's just looking. And I had read this, I always read biographies, I've read this biography of her and the director, Ruben Mamalian, she asked the same question, well, what do I do? And he said, don't do anything, just look. So that's what he did. And then I said, well, look at the audience. So when he's looking out, he's looking right at the audience. And it also gave him a chance to sort of, you know, compose himself and get ready. Because it was, as you can imagine, quite a workout, especially for someone who's ill. Yeah. I think when I saw the Belinda performance that they have, he was no longer as strong, I think as a performer. A question to Gary, did you work with Ron on the text? Or did you just deliver it? Or it was so long ago, how did it work out to get your text right? We actually got a lot of kinescopes that are old. We tried to get, like, documents of... Interviews with Ron. ...interviews so that I could get Roy Cohn's vocabulary down and also a little bit the rhythms that he spoke in. And he had also... There was like three or four books that he had ostensibly written or had written for him. So, you know, we've all read all of that. And, you know, I mean, I made it up and I got really pissed off when the New York Times reviewed the play and said I had made, like, a collage of things that Roy Cohn had said. He'd never said anything that was in that speech. Cohn actually was quite, I mean, he was smart. And he could, in that really mean way, he could be really funny. And he was also very skilled at presenting himself in public. So, like, in all these interviews, he would say funny things and he did talk just like... I mean, he'd talk really fast and he would name drop constantly and, you know, all that stuff. Yeah, I mean, I thought it was fun to do, but I'm sure that's because he was dead. Which would not be the case if you were trying to do something with Donald Trump. The thing he was dead, he would have sued you. Oh, yeah, no, he would sue you for anything. Yeah, I think... And that's where Trump learned everything, was from him, basically. In the latest, the Vanity Fair project of Roy Cohn, they claimed for a long time, they spoke daily, Trump and Cohn, and it was one of his... He was his mentor, Mephistophilus, in a way. No, he was. Roy Cohn told him... You know, I mean, Roy Cohn connected him with all these mafia people for one thing. You know, that's how all the Trump buildings got built. And... But he taught him, like, don't ever apologize for anything and don't ever back down. Somebody attacks you, you go back twice as hard. And that's what Roy Cohn did. I mean, he was one of the originators of the frivolous lawsuit, that could bankrupt somebody that he was pulled into litigation that was frivolous, essentially, and without foundation, but would bankrupt the people that he went after. I mean, and... We just live in the debris of Roy Cohn and that weasel in the White House. Stephen Miller, I think, was the other protege of Roy Cohn. Oh, no, Roger Stone. Roger Stone. But that weasel looks just like him. Stephen Miller looks exactly like Roy Cohn. He's like he was cloned from him. I just want to recognize Pedro Juan Rosado, Chico. Maybe put some light on the audience, if possible. Is there anyone else in this room who was involved in the original production? No. Anyway, but there are several people here, many people probably, who also worked with Ron, and we wanted to open it up. Well, Lee Brewer is here. He directed Ron in Lear. Do you want to say something, Lee? Have anything to contribute? We have a microphone coming. We hear better, but we also record it. But yes, it could be questions, comments. It was a great privilege to work with Ron in Lear and I had an amazing cast, including our dear friend over here. Pick a wave. Lola Paschalinski. Who played Kent. And sitting next to Alissa, who was the dramaturg, and Karedos Gendel, Ruth Malachuk, and Greg, who was up there. Who was the fool. Who was amazing. But I must say, I really wanted a Mississippi accent and Ron was the only one that gave me a perfect one. He played Regan, who was just brilliant. Bill Raymond played Gonerl. And who else? Is he Monk? Is he? Isabel Monk played... Gloucester. Gloucester. It's a long time ago. But it was... and Pauline Oliveres did the music. So it was quite an exciting group of people to work with. But Ron was one of the stars. I just wanted to pay homage a little bit. This was a great performance that I saw tonight. I never saw the complete tape. I saw a little bit of it over Greg's at one time. But this was one of the greatest performances I've seen. I've seen maybe get it ranked with the top two or three performances that I've seen. I think it's just a great piece of work. And from a directorial point of view, I think that Ron was brilliant in this piece. Absolutely brilliant. He believed everything. It was absolutely hilarious. And it was totally tragic. It was a beautiful combination. He was a great actor. And it was a great loss. So I just want to say, bless you, Ron Lutter. Anybody? Jill. Can you hand that mic to Jill Godbinlow? Thank you. Just briefly, Greg, you can answer this. I once read somewhere that Ron said that when he was growing up and realizing he was gay, there were only two public gay figures, two gays that he knew of. And one was Roy Cohn and the other was Jack Smith. Is that just wonderful legend or two ways to be gay? I don't think that's true. But I know when Ron moved to New York, he immediately contacted the Gay Liberation Front. Those were gay people. Is it true that he mixed in some of Jack Smith's ashes into his eye shadow? Yes, that's true. I just want to say one other thing. Into the glitter. The glitter. Ron had two brilliant texts to perform. And he learned to perform texts with the Worcester Group and other work he did. And they come from three different sources and they were perfect, but somebody wrote that Jack Smith, that Roy Cohn, and Jack Smith wrote that other text. And every actor should have texts like that to work with. We have a microphone coming. It's going to come right away. Lola Paschalinski. This is just sort of a side thing just for point of information. I wasn't it true that Ron played Roy Cohn in the London production, the first London production of Angels in America? No. Am I imagining it? There was an interview in The Times. Yeah, there was a double interview in The Times with Ron Vaughn and Ron Liebman. Right. They invited, I went to the thing. It was so crazy because Ron Liebman, like we were talking about, is a product, I guess he's dead now, was a product of total commercial theater and was doing his version. So they asked them to speak about that. And I think Ron Liebman had done it in London before he was asked to do it here. Right. And just on a side note, it's coming back to Broadway with the famous gay actor Nathan Lane. Right. Must the innocent suffer. And the actor who played Roy Cohn in Citizen Cohn has just been accused of sexual harassment. Yeah. I love that you have him out and catch. That's a great moment in the script. I'm glad you clarified that. They did ask Ron after this. They asked him to play the engineer in Miss Saigon. So they gave us the tickets, the fabulous tickets to Miss Saigon and then Ron wanted to leave during the first act. And I said, you can't leave. They gave you these tickets. You have to at least sit through it to replace Jonathan Price, the original person. LSD. Just the high points. I remember he was in the audience one night. I'm such a star fucker, really. But I remember that. And then you and Jonathan and Ron went out to dinner after. And it just so happened that I and a party of other people went out to dinner at the same place. Yeah, no, it was a great success. It was I think partially because it was so different than Ron's other work that it attracted all, you know, this old audience but also a new audience too. So, yeah, that was very exciting. I think, you know, one thing we didn't talk about was that it's a maybe this is part of why I mean people came to it because it was great and word got out and that's why people came. But I think also part of it is that it's it's a piece about among other things, homophobia before AIDS. You know, it's it's it's very much of its moment and still very timely. Unfortunately, but but neither of the people he's representing, even though both of them died of AIDS are are in a moment. They're represented at an earlier time. And what we come to understand about them has to do with the. And you use that disease imagery in the in the context toward the end of homosexuality itself as a virus. And it just sort of speaks to the that, you know, poison of that that social poison. The parts that you're you're talking about there. I put them in because the reaction to the to the epidemic initially was very much the same as the reaction to the gay rights bill. And it was couched in the same kind of language of contagion infection disease. Something you can catch. I think we have time for one or two more questions, comments. This is really question for Greg, because I think you'll remember about this thing that I can't quite remember. There was a really beautiful sort of behind the scenes making of documentary about the tour of this show in Europe that that German woman made. Gaye Kaltagener. And sometime every once a year, the Siegel Center has a festival of theater on film and video. And that was really never released beyond maybe a little festival circuit. But if someone could dig up a copy of that, I have a copy. This woman, German documentary filmmaker, Gaye Kaltagener, who unfortunately died some years ago. She just idolized Ron and she, you know, she was European and she made these Europe, small European films. And so she said, oh, can I just follow you around on the European tour and and make this film? So she did. It's called Free Fall and it's a beautiful, it's she didn't shoot any of the performance. She only shot like backstage in the hotel. Yeah, like no real, I think like five seconds. Someone opens the door and you see him on stage, but it wasn't about that. So yeah, that's a good idea because it gives a yeah, as you were saying, it was later and he was that was a very difficult tour for him and everyone involved. And so there's a lot of him like lying in bed in the hotel room and she's she asked all these very simple questions and he talks because he knew like this was this kind of last testament. So yeah, I'll look for that. That's an interesting idea. Maybe a John, if you want to make a comment and then you. Do you want to, John? John Jezrin, after we did this show, we did. Well, there were two more projects that happened. I'll tell you about the last one first. The last one was, oh no, there were three. After this, we decided, oh, we'll do a play where, you know, I directed Ron, he'll direct me. So we did this play that Lola was involved in called Queer and Alone based on a novel by James Cormony. My name is, oh, Jim Strauss, sorry. My name is Desmond Farquhar and that is my real name. I just hate it when people change their names all the time, don't you? That was the opening. We did that at the kitchen. Then we did this play, well, Ron did this play, Philoctetes. It was three different versions, correct me if I'm wrong, John, but it was, I think, Sophocles, Andre Gide, and then Ron commissioned John Jezrin to write the third adaptation of the ancient myth of Philoctetes, which he gets bitten by a snake in his exile to an island where he's tormented. So, John, can you talk about that experience? Just a little bit, but yeah, I did want to just say that it is interesting, I think Jill was saying this kind of connection between the writer and the actor. That it is kind of important that Ron was able to pull this stuff out of the writers. He seemed to have some kind of radar of what he wanted to get, and so he was able to persuade me to write this, I did not want to write a Greek anything at that point. Basically, he kind of said, well, it doesn't have to really be a Greek, just write a play and we'll call it Philoctetes, kind of idea. So that was that kind of a way of pulling material, not by dictating it to me or anything like that, but there's a great connection between actors and writers that people don't talk about. And in a way, they don't even talk about it. It's just kind of this osmosis and a connection in what one thinks the other one might be able to do. So, yeah, this was a completely, you know, idea completely came out, to me, completely came out of the blue. And then I thought, oh my God, now Gary and Deanna has written this great thing and I have to write a Greek play. So what am I going to do? So anyway, I just think it's important to remember there's this very interesting connection. So that's kind of how, you know, my play came about and also had to be done very, very quickly. There was a kind of a time limit, which I think Ron was very honest about. He said, you know, this is it. Who knows. So I had to sort of work quickly and sort of under a cloud. And so, but anyway, so that's kind of how that happened. And he did, I think he had a great connection to, I mean, you can say, to language that it was important. And I think, yeah, some of it did come out of his work. He certainly had a lot of great language, but I also think, to his credit, he, you know, keeps the writer on their toes. You know, it cannot be less than, you know, he can do for you. So I was, you know, thrilled with that. So anyway, yeah, that's one more person. I just want to say something that I just want to ask John something, actually, because I was thinking the whole time we were watching this, that we were under this, we were all operating under the strangest constraints and weirdness, because we didn't rush developing Roy Combe. We didn't. And we knew that Ron could die anytime. And it was one of the stranger things was that the project, we had such perfectionistic wishes for it that we refused to, you know, I mean, it took a year to develop it. And during that year, as I think when, correct me if I'm wrong, in the parlance of the time that Ron Siro, I mean, he went from being HIV positive. Well, it was officially diagnosed. Yeah. I think actually afterwards the performances started. No, no, before. Before. But maybe not publicly. But it was weird. It was just very strange. Yeah. No, it was, it was, well, that was the thing. I mean, it wasn't just us. There were many, many people in the theater who were, you know, designers, all kinds of people who were like, well, I want to work. I mean, I'm sick, but I want to work. So like, you would go to work and then like, oh, that person, you know, and then the next day you'd be like, oh, that person died. You're like, what? But then after a while it became, I mean, you know, as, you know, there'd be like 50 people you knew who died or 100 people you knew who died. And then every day you'd read about peace when you go, oh, Michael Bennett. Oh, yeah. And so, yeah. So I mean, I'm sure a lot of you know, but in this case, if the actor had died, there wouldn't have been any play. Right. So this was, this was beef. No, it never opened. It, they did a couple of performances and then he couldn't do it. So after that, we took a train. We got a grant from the Rockefeller Foundation to go to, what's it called? Bellagio and Lake Homo. And we worked on the final thing we ever worked on, which was called Dark Victory, which was included all these parts of novels like Brothers Karamazov and Uncle Tom's Cabin and all these scenes where a dying person, two scenes. It was for me and Ron. I said, you directed me. I directed you. Now we'll work together. And Susan Sontag was the director. And it was all these two scenes. And we alternated between the person who's dying and the caretaker person. But when we got to Bellagio, that was it. He couldn't do anymore and had to go to the hospital. And then he just wanted to go back to New York. So we got on the plane and he died on the plane going back to New York. I would say I'm seeing this might be a good moment to go over. It's already this possible. I know. What? Yes? Oh, okay. Well, I don't know if she's here. There's a biography coming out of him by this author named Teresa's. Oh, hi. So maybe you should ask her. But okay, I think that's enough. And we're going to have a short reception now. Yeah. Again, thank you for coming. And thank you for being here. And thank you. We have a reception. Thank you.