 Hello, thank you everyone for coming. This is our second studio visit for the Pailu Festival and featuring the Builders Association. So first thank them so much for coming to Brownville Hall. I just want to give you, my name is Andrew Kertra, I'm the curator of the festival this year. I wanted to give you a little sense of what you're going to see tonight, what this model is. I was hoping, given that we're at the Segal Center, we're at the Graduate Center, we could take a moment to appreciate not only work in progress, but the critical discourse that can surround a work. And so we invited each of the artists that are in the studio visits to one, give you a sense of where this work fits into a larger artistic project, to share the work. And then also we together invited someone, in this case Helen Shaw, to facilitate a deeper conversation about the work. And so that's what we're going to do today. I have nothing more to say except to hand the microphone off, and thank you so much. Thank you. Hi everyone. We are the Builders Association, as was previously stated, that's Dan Dobson, the sound designer, Hannah Heller, Mo Angelos, James Gibbs, Katie Brooke, Sean Donovan, yeah, Jennifer Tipton, our lighting designer, Sharon Connelly, our board member. And phoning it in from Santa Cruz, California, Marianne Weems, hi Marianne, and millions of viewers around the world. This is being live streamed. So we are a performance ensemble based here in New York City, and we have some people that are theater and performance people, and we have a lot of other folks who come from various disciplines, design, architecture, fine art, et cetera. And so that tends to make our work quite interdisciplinary because our process is pretty radically interdisciplinary, I would say. And we even scoop up in that net people who have no interest whatsoever in theater. But they are moved to give it a shot, right? So we've created 17 large scale productions which have toured to over 80 venues over the last 20 plus years. Let's just name a few. And we are in the center, BAM, Maison des Arts in Paris. Rome, Bogota, Dan says we were never in Berlin, so I'm not going to say that one. And also more unexpected venues such as V2 in Rotterdam, Stime in Amsterdam, The Whitney, The Guggenheim, and our last four shows had their New York premiers at BAM. So it takes at the minimum two years, I would say, to make one of these shows. And you can all buy a very handsome book put out by MIT Press about the research and development process. It really breaks it down. There's lots of pictures. It'll look good on the coffee table. So James. So yeah, there's a few pictures that are actually from that book up on the screen. And you've probably noticed, for those of you that aren't familiar with the work, there's a lot of tech and a lot of media in our work. And one of the things that Mary Ann liked to say about the work is that it's 21st century storytelling to tell 21st century stories, which is to say that for the most part, the stories that we tell involve media. They involve some of this technology and screens and some of the drama and drama strategy of the stories is actually transacted through media. So our goal is to make this, the media work in the performance integrated and intrinsic to the shows themselves. The other thing is that we build the shows with the creative team in place. And that is, that's one of the reasons, in addition to fundraising, why it can take like two years to build one of these shows. The goal really is to bring the designers and the tech and the media to the table at the beginning and not to, say, set the text before those designers have done their work. So again, the goal of that is to move each element of the stage craft forward at the same time instead of just bringing in media towards the end. And sometimes that actually means that Mo and I, who have co-written the last couple of shows, have had in mind like whole lines that we've basically deleted from the text because they're being carried on stage by the media. So just to give a little bit of a context for this work that we're doing on this, the Einrand piece, we just wanted to talk briefly about a couple of other shows, House Divided, Sontag Reborn, and Elements of Oz. House Divided was our show, which is a mash-up of John Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath and the 2008 mortgage-backed securities crisis that unfolded in the financial system, really almost took the financial system down. So that show basically mixed up Steinbeck with primary source material from the crash. Quarterly investors' calls from Lehman Brothers right before Lehman went down from Bear Stearns and from Goldman Sachs. And then also finally the testimony of Alan Greenspan at the SEC hearing where he confessed to being surprised that the market wasn't doing what he expected and thought that it should do and what he had spent the last 20 plus years steering the basis on which he had spent the last 25 years steering the U.S. economy. And you'll see Alan Greenspan has become like a recurring character in the builder's work, which are working on a cycle of Alan Greenspan's stories. So that's just to set that up a little bit. Let's watch this video, a little video of House Divided that includes Marianne talking about the work probably better than I just did. So actual people in the show are telling actual stories about their displacement and what they're doing with their lives now. And those stories are intercut with John Steinbeck's The Grapes of Raph, a great American classic which is about Americans from a previous generation from the 1930s whose farm has been repossessed by the banks and who set out on the road towards California. It's our land. We measured it. That don't make it yours. The production has the builder's usual aesthetic mix of media and live performance. There's a very rich soundtrack that's being played live on stage and there are layers of video that are projected onto a house, a foreclosed house that we were fortunate enough to get our hands on and cut up and repurpose as the actual set for the show. So the house is a very singular character on stage and it's sort of a container for these ideas about the broken home. I just returned from London where we are setting up our news. If Bear's writing mortgages in Europe, other big banks there are going to take a hit. We're going to clean out foreclosed homes for real-series or banks. Get them ready for resale. The usual definition of trash out is cleaning out any leftover items. We're going to clean out all of the items. We're going to clean out all of the items for real-series or banks. We're going to clean out all of the items. We're going to clean out all of the leftover items from the previous owner that they weren't able to take with them, usually to include furniture, clothes, toys, kitchenware, that kind of deal. As personal items go, found obviously boxes of pictures, travel trinkets that people have applied. It amazed me at the stuff that I do find that they do leave behind and I think you or I would probably at least want to take with this. There's no way the subprime crisis could have been predicted and even now, there's no way of no order. I'm usually waking up to the American investment by Lehman Brothers has filed for bankruptcy in New York. That's happened in the last few minutes. It means the Wall Street Institution, which has been in business for a hundred and fifty years and survived the Great Depression, is now the most high-profile casualty of the credit crop tops of Lehman Brothers. The four largest U.S. investment banks said it's filing for bankruptcy protection and no one has ever thought that it's broken. But I'm replying to many of them. That's the takeover of the Bank of America. It's been a long time. It's been a long time. Okay. So that's a little illustration, I guess, of the way that the builders are concerned not only about character, but about systems as well, including financial systems. Sontag Reborn is a much smaller piece and I'll just say a couple of words about that. It's more of a chamber piece. That was a one-woman piece and probably closer to the scale of what this Iran piece is going to end up being. Sontag herself was a friend to the company and that piece basically uses her journals and some media to show her creating Sontag, the public intellectual and writer, through using the journals and through using her later annotations of the journals as Sontag, the great intellectual. The last little piece I wanted to talk about, the last big piece I wanted to talk about is Elements of Oz, our last big show, which was a retelling of the Oz story, which is a story that comes back up during depression. It's part of the tradition of escapism in entertainment. But it's also a story that people tend to try to take possession of and it was about that as well. One of the allegories of Oz, some of you might be aware of this, is that it's financial, people propose or believe that it's a financial allegory and that the Yellowbrick Road represents the gold standard. The slippers, which are silver in the books, not ruby, represent journalism adding silver to the gold standard. Tin Man, Industrial Workers, Scarecrow, all of that. And in the Oz show, we actually ended up mentioning Alan Greenspan again and using Ayn Rand to kind of give people a little bit of an inroads into some of the financial stuff behind that allegory. And we dug up this 1959 interview with Mike Wallace and Ayn Rand and we'll show a little bit of that as well. For those of you, this will just be silent, just so you can see, but for those of you who don't know, perhaps you all know, Ayn Rand is kind of like the prophet of the free market of capitalism and greed is good. And I think a huge, well clearly a huge influence on people who are in power in the US now and like I said about Greenspan, people who've been in charge of the financial system for some time. So yeah, we were working with this clip. This is 1959, this is our first television interview. Not many people had really been on TV yet at that point and so people don't understand how to be telegenic. She's not looking at the camera, she's like a cornered animal or something. She's nervous and her eyes are like darting back and forth like this. When we were watching it we were saying, oh yeah, that's a trauma response. People track their eyes back and forth when they're remembering a trauma or if they're trying to cope with a stressful situation. And James said, Ayn Rand trauma response, that's a great title. So here we are. And just to say further, in a way that it began with looking at this video and then we started talking about what that really meant. And Ayn Rand always basically presented herself as like sweet generous, like zero influences. She occasionally would say that Aristotle had been an influence, but that was it. Nobody else. And she also was uninterested in like airing the dirty laundry of her history and where she came from and insisted that it had no bearing whatsoever on her work or her life. And that's actually the thing that we're most interested in, in Ayn Rand. And I think that she's an opportunity for the builders to combine some of these interests that we've had in systems and in biography and in character. So she's in fact born Alyssa Zenovjevna Rosenbaum. And Ayn Rand was born to a pretty prosperous upper middle class Jewish family in St. Petersburg. And at the age of five, basically witnessed the revolution, lost everything and fled to America, and then created Ayn Rand out of that. So trauma response kind of began with this video and it's a little bit jokey, but really it's an interesting side of this person. And whatever, whatever you fall on your opinion about her work, her philosophy, her writing, it's a fascinating and actually kind of sympathetic story. And so that's one of our big interests. And with that, I guess I'll leave you guys to it. Who saw Alyssa off to the train station on January 17th, 1926 on her way to America? I, Natasha and Mama saw her off. I don't remember if Papa was there or not. How long did Alyssa plan her visit in America to be? I think she was planning to go there for good. She wanted to get me, Papa and Mama, out to the U.S. How did Alyssa change when she moved to America? She became more egoistic and made egoism into a philosophy? Try living by such a philosophy. Then you can judge whether it is rational or not. When Alyssa was leaving Russia she thought she was going to the Mecca of the film industry to make her career. Her correspondence was of an impulsive nature. I recall such sentences from her letters as to be the male scenario writer. And I got married. I think she wanted to stun us with her successes. Do you remember of Cousin Alyssa's visit to Chicago in 1926? Well, Mother told me that because Alyssa was coming to stay with us we had to move our beds around. We didn't have another bedroom. There wasn't room for people to stay with us in our apartment. We had five of us. All sleeping in bedrooms and a dining room. Harvey and I always laugh because we had to give up our beds in the dining room to her. We had two little cops in the dining room and we had to move out because she had her typewriter in the dining room and that's where she slept. What did she like to talk about? Oh, she talked about the theater and about politics and her ideas and she would get very excited and strong about it. She wrote stories when she was there and the typewriter was always clacking away. She was just a cousin who came to Chicago and could hardly speak English and we didn't know she was going to be a great writer with great ideas. She was just another one of the green horns that grandpa and the uncles and aunts brought in but we wanted everybody to live in the land of milk and honey. Did she take to America? I'm sitting on top of the world. I remember her singing that over and over again. She kind of drove us crazy because she was up all night and then she would take showers at night and she was a night person and I don't know if they had showers in Russia but she just loved to take a shower at night. How would you describe her then? Well, she wasn't pretty. She was very angular and she wore very short hair and she was very opinionated. Did she have clear political views then? Oh, I think so. She hated and hated and hated the Bolsheviks as she used to call them. She thought they were the worst people on earth and they were the ones who ruined all of her good living, the good life that they had before that. She was adamant about that. She had a great deal of hate for the red Russians. She would talk about that all the time. Murderers, killers, thieves, terrible people. She hated communism. Did she miss her family? She always wanted her sister to come. I know she told me that. Eleonora, she wished her whole family was here but especially she wanted that sister to come. She wanted her to see America. What's your strongest memory of Einrand? When she lived at our house when I was a little girl I helped her pick out her new name, Rand. She had this little old Remington Rand typewriter and she had it on our dining room table and one day she said, I'm going to change my name but I wanted to be an A and an R and we called her Alice. She said, I picked out my first name. It's going to be Ein. It's sort of a Finnish derivative, she told me. And she said, I need an R and I was looking at the typewriter so then I said, what about Rand? And she said, oh good, that's it, Einrand. And I think that was early on in her visit. She must have been excited to get her new name. Oh yeah, she wanted to start new and be American. Raising my head to look at the skyscrapers. I sit in a restaurant on very high chairs like in futuristic movie sets and use a straw to sip fruit cocktails brought to me by a real Negro. Cups yell, come on girl, make fun of everybody else but English at all. And it is all jokes as they are called here. The only thing that remains for me is the characteristic straight line decisiveness. Okay. You came to America when you were about 20 or 21 years old. That's right. And you went to Hollywood. Was this because of your interest in screenwriting? You did earn your living in the early years in Hollywood in a variety of ways, I suppose. Good for one's character to have to suffer that way. It gives you a certain self-confidence if you can overcome it and rise above it but as such, I don't think hardships are good for any of us. Cousins owned a movie theater in Chicago. A small neighborhood theater. So she gave me a letter of introduction to the DeMille studio. Time had an independent studio of his own in Culver City. What he was famous for is society, glamour, sex, and adventure and I liked all of his films I had seen in Russia. He was my particular and presented that letter. I enter his job if it was possible. He started driving. He drives up to the gate, stops, looks at me and asks. I told him I had just come from Russia and I'm very happy to see him. So, and says, get in. Shall we talk about my... December 4th, 1936. The first purpose of this book is the defense of egoism in its real meaning. The fountain head is about individualism versus collectivism, not in politics but in man's soul. The reason I chose architecture as the background is because it is a field of work that covers both art and the basic need of men's survival. And because one cannot find the more eloquent symbol of man as creator than a man who is a builder. His antithesis, the collectivists are destroyers. Publishers Little and Brown said, this is a work of almost genius. Genius in the power of its expression, almost in the sense of its enormous bitterness. High grade literature, very intellectual. There's no readership for it. I said to Frank, if someone doesn't appreciate it well that's their bad standard. And I knew I would have to sell 100,000 copies to reach my kind of reader. July 3rd, 19th, Mr. DeMille. This letter is primarily to express my gratitude to you at the distance of so many years. I have always wanted to tell you how much I appreciated your kindness and interest in me at the time when if you remember I was a very inexperienced, very bewildered and frightened little immigrant from Russia. If I have achieved any kind of success I owe it to your instructions which I have remembered and tried to follow all these years. I have always hoped that the day would come when I would be successful enough to show you that you had not wasted the attention you had given me at my start in Hollywood. I am taking the liberty of sending you a synopsis of my story, Red Pawn, which Paramount has just bought as a possible vehicle for Marlene Dietrich. If you would be kind enough to read it, I would be very grateful. Grant me a little time to see you afterwards. I met Ayn Rand in 1946 when I was her secretary when she did the fountain head at Warner Brothers Studios. I lived with Ayn and Frank in their house in the valley for a matter of months in 1946. I was more or less a glorified errand boy. She had beautiful eyes, black hair, very beautiful lips and very prominent lips. A lovely face, not especially big but a beautiful smile. But boy, you looked at that woman and you knew that was a dynamic personality. There was a lot of sex in her face. It was amazing. She was a very sensual woman. You could feel a sensuality about her. She'd ask me about Hollywood, what I knew. She was always interested in Hollywood people, what they were like and what their lives were and that sort of thing. Oh, she liked music. She had a kind of cute little trick. She'd walk around with a cane and tap it on the floor and do a semi tap dance routine. She'd come in at night with a cane and walk around swinging her cane doing a little two step. All a deep trick. Maybe 10 or 15 minutes. Oh, there would be music on the radio as I recall. Frank and I'd look and watch and laugh. It was quite fascinating. She was adorable. Struck and jokingly called her salon. Tell me about the collective during those Saturday evening gatherings. I would usually arrive after most of the others and all the men would rise to their feet as a gesture of respect. There was a lot of reverence and hero worship directed at Miss Rand. Sometimes it was like being in a room with a person treated as a demigod. Miss Rand never asked for that openly, but she had to be aware of it and perhaps she could have changed it, but she didn't. The evenings were primarily very serious, stimulating discussions about art, philosophy, politics, hardly ever light conversations, very little laughter or casual socializing, and lots of cigarette smoking. I was one of the few non-smokers. To sit there and see particularly the girls with their cigarette holders trying to look like Ein Rand, it was very sad. Talk about social metaphysics. They had people in their 20s in formative stages of their lives sitting at the feet of a genius. Not only that, but many of them had no life except objectivism and Ein Rand. Now what do you expect to happen in that kind of relationship? They were immature, they were overawed, easily swayed, influenced, intimidated. It was overwhelming and in some cases psychologically and creatively stunting and paralyzing. And Ellen Greenspan was there too. There have been a number of people who have said, I know many of you have heard this line, Atlas shrugged, changed my life. The fountain had changed my life. Here's a woman who's read by millions around the world. She may be our most debated philosopher. She identifies that to which she adheres as objectivism. We care about it. We care very much about your sharing with us, your feelings about this most interesting lady, a warm human being who has a lot to say and comes straight at everything she says. I am pleased to present Ein Rand. Let's dive right in. Miss Rand, I'm still not sure why you are so harsh on those who would sacrifice for others. Because it is a kind of cannibalism. That is to say selfishness. There would be less horror, less war, less Hitler. There wouldn't be any. Let's take your thesis then and accept it. Now I'm going to be selfish. I'm going to be a real talented and charismatic and I'm going to have a lot of money and a lot of banks and pretty soon nobody is going to be able to compete with me because I've already purchased all my competitors. And now I have dictatorial power over people who can name the price of bacon or the price of oil or whatever it is the commodity I'm selling. You know, I agree with you that you are very talented and you can accomplish a great deal and already have, but you are talking about the impulsive society. Nobody can become among the system itself. The free market will destroy you. How do you explain mobile oil? Exxon, how do you explain the prices they are able to charge for oil? The oil companies, customers, the government, who? So in other words, if I try to be Mr. Big and charge outrageously high prices for gasoline, alright, let's change trains for a moment and turn to our audience. I want to change the topic and go back to what you said about history. 15 years ago I was impressed with your books. Today, however, I am more educated and I find that if a company and... This is what I don't want to answer. Well, wait a minute. You haven't heard the question yet. She's already estimating of her brain. Well, I am more educated now than I was 15 years ago when I was in high school and before I read the newspapers. I am not interested in your biography in any context. We'll let her make her points. It's very basic. If a company is permitted to do what it wants to do like ITT, you wind up with ITT in Nazi Germany doing whatever it damn well pleases and any other company in the United States doing the same thing. Conglomerates can do whatever they want. ITT owns everything from baking companies to telephone companies to munitions plants and I mean, I really think that's wrong. Well, Miss Rand thinks it's wrong too but she's saying that it's not government force that's going to correct the problem. I don't... We encourage you to make a contribution to that observation. She wasn't impolite. I do not sanction impoliteness. It started the dropping of politeness and of manners. You are equating someone who disagrees with you with impoliteness. That's not fair. Oh no. If you didn't interrupt me, then I am not evading the question. If impolitely I will be delighted to answer. But there was nothing impolite. You are punishing this woman for the energy and vigor that she brought to the dialogue and that's not fair. This is the kind of woman we spend a long time trying to attract to our television audience. Okay, commercial break and we're back. I, new question. Do you see any reason for social aid, for welfare, for charity? I'm surprised that someone with your intelligence, I, can be so emotional in her approach. I am not interested in the woman's history. She didn't have to begin it that way. I'm sorry, our time is up. Have a nice day everybody. Goodbye. She was coming home to die. The doctor told both of us, if she goes home she will die. She wanted to go home and die. And asked if I would take her home. But she was certain and if I knew and cherished her and if I cherished one thing of Ein Rand and if I shared one thing with Ein Rand it was a commitment to the right and the freedom of the individual to make choices. I would not or could not deprive her of that right. I said I would take her home to die. I do not wish to speak of my years in Russia. No. When I was five, my mother came into the playroom. The meaning of human life here on this earth is the joy one has achieved. The floor was littered with toys. Mother announced that we must choose some toys to put away and some to keep now. Suffering, pain, humiliation, all this is an irrelevant accident. In a year she said we could trade the toys we had kept for those she put away. Natasha held on to her favorites. But I, imagining the pleasure I would receive from having my favorite toys returned a whole year later, I gave her my best loved playthings. Are in no sense inevitably the creatures of their environment. Mother took my mechanical wind up chicken the little thing with yellow and blue painted feathers made of tin. It made a noise when it wobbled along the floor. We do not have to be influenced or formed by the people and events around us. Exactly one year later I asked for my toys back. We are free to make choices to evaluate. She was amused. She explained that she had given everything to the orphanage. We are free to come to our own conclusions. She was smiling. Man of self made soul. Mother said that if I had really loved that chicken I wouldn't have relinquished it in the first place. It is pointless to talk about childhood, parents, experiences. This was my first encounter with altruism. I am interested only in the future. My name is Helen Shaw. I am a critic. Andrew very kindly asked me to give a critical interaction with the beast. I had a couple of thoughts and then one thing I wanted to spring on all of you. Can I see a show of hands? Who has been introduced? Who has seen a builder's show before? For those who haven't seen one you should note that as you saw from the presentation in the beginning builder's productions happen very logically complex and they use projection and research in a layering way. What might not have been so obvious from the presentation is that they operate the same way against each other so that the builder's association is named for its first production and its first production is always hovering behind every subsequent production. In a way the most macro season they are all readable on top of each other. It's like a Wikipedia wormhole that takes you all night. One idea leads to the next and when James was talking about the history of the pieces that informed this one there are others that are also readable inside the work they're constructing now. One for instance is, oh gosh, what's the one about data bodies? Thank you. They were one of the first companies to talk about the way that we interact with the data cloud, with the data body that we construct around ourselves, that now, I'm sure you woke up this morning and thought I better not look on Amazon for anything embarrassing because that will be associated with me until I die and will surely be sold on to a series of, if not, commercial bodies. Certainly the Russians will know everything about you soon as a Yahoo user. I just discovered this morning that I will be banned, I think even after my death. The idea of internet dramaturgy, the kind of thinking that we do now that we interact with so much of our information on screen and through the multiple tabs open all the time that sit there like little reminders that we forget are there. Someone said recently, I feel a little sense of loss every time I have to restart my computer and I lose all my tabs. The idea that you lose all the things that you had made this sort of vague mental note to look up later like a little death every day, I thought that was quite charming. I of course haven't shut down my computer in three years but I'm sure that if I were to restart that's what would happen as well. And that Anne Rand at first seems to be a very, I mean this is a cat who did not really miss with the internet obviously. She checked out before that was a big thing but that she is kind of an ur-text, not only for those of us who, I would say most of us who interact with the web there's many of us read, actually another show of hands who has read anything by Anne Rand ever. Anyone who hasn't? James? Oh, okay, okay. I almost replaced him on the show just then, I don't know if you saw that. I read the found out, I was 16, I'm sorry. Yeah, yeah, no it's good but you do have to respond. Our current political system is also coded at a deep level, at an interestingly deep level by the things that Rand wrote, partially because we have a strain of politics now which is kind of forever 16. We're living in a kind of the weird future that we found ourselves in is this permanent, it's not infantilization but it's this permanent high school, we're in a permanent high school mentality. Not only do we watch only comic book movies but we also have a politics which has frozen at the level of your high school drama club with a similar level of sophistication in its politics. The thing, I did a bit of reading about Rand, I had not thought about Rand I guess not really consciously the builder said we're doing it and it turns out Ivo van Hove is doing the fountain head which will be at BAM in a few weeks and the idea of Ivo van Hove, I'm going to just take a guess and say that the women will be in heels and the guys will take their shirts off but I could be wrong and in fact, so that sort of was bubbling up and then in the sort of, I showed this picture to the builders earlier which is mysteriously I was coming out of Grand Central and as I walked out of Grand Central I made eye contact with a man who was holding up a sign that said I ran tours of Fifth Avenue and I had somewhere to be but I thought all this would be the best you know, ten dollars I ever spent but no, that's unfortunately lost to history so we'll have to imagine it. Now, when I then went I thought oh goodness I better look up Ein Rand, first of all, is it Ein or Ann? It's Ein and the first thing I did was naturally I went to the website because that's how I process information is I think there must be a website somewhere. I did also read the Wikipedia page but her website her website, sure, anyway, the Einrand.org if you go there which is, I want to encourage you all to do it, first of all because it will add such a sort of a fun spice to your data body so that when your data body is sold to Uber or whoever they'll be like wow this is so interesting, they go to shows at the seagull and they've been to Einrand.org and Einrand.org first of all there's a little video which is just utterly charming which is about, you know, oh she's very misunderstood and really objectivism is about the idea that there is nothing beyond what is real okay, I thought, I'm signed up to that, I'm going to keep scrolling I think there's nothing beyond what is real as well, check, fine as you keep going down though a little dialogue box appears and I'm quite used to dialogue boxes I work at Time Out and if any of you have ever tried to navigate the Time Out website you know that it is just actually dialogue boxes all the way down and that this, so I was ready for it and so it appeared in the lower left of the screen and it said did you get what you came here for and the one thing you can check there's one option, I've gotten what I came here for so that's cool anyway, so the but the reading that I was doing was of course eventually I fell down the rabbit hole of reading not necessarily what Rand had written but what has been written about her and that the change in American politics which has always seemed so bewildering to me, I'm a lefty and I've always believed that it was the only logical thing to be a lefty, that it would be very difficult in fact to talk yourself into being anything other than a lefty, what are you out there doing thinking, let's take away the good roads, what a bunch of madness that would be and that Rand, what Rand has done is she, at the level, at the brilliant level, the brilliant level of propaganda, she marries the moral passion of the left and in fact even the world view of the left to rightist politics, by saying what she does is she comes to us, she says no no I am an anti-Bolshevik the Bolsheviks took everything from me, but the way that she describes the large and the small groups of society is actually quite Marxist, she describes them as makers and takers which is the same in fact as a communist point of view is that there is a class of makers and there is a class of takers, she just inverts them and that she also, she so convincingly makes it seem not just strange but wrong that she makes it seem like a painful and punching action to ask those who have benefited to give more, that she makes it, she makes the rich a put upon group, she makes the rich a group that should be pitied and no one likes anything as much as they like pity we pity ourselves so well, I remember my nightmare as a human being was when I was in a ballet class in, I'm gonna call this eighth grade and my self pity was total it was cosmic and I don't know why I just thought I'm so lonely, no one understands me it's possible I'm gonna have to walk home from this class I just, I don't even, I don't know how no one is seeing the kind of the radiance and clarity of the pain of my situation and so I dedicated that ballet class to myself and I did all of it and I felt that as I moved across the floor doing jetes better on the right than on the left, that people could see that there was something aching and beautiful about my artistry and I moved my own self to tears and I think that was the bottom, that's what I had to rebound from as a person and when I read a few years later I read The Fountainhead, I never made it to Alice Shrugged but I did read The Fountainhead and okay now be brutally honest, brutally honest did anything, ooh you know what let's do it Montessori style so in Montessori if you really agree it's a full five, right? So let's have recess full five, let's not have recess that's a one, okay? So you have a whole spectrum of response that's possible, so five is a total yes, one is an absolute no but you have a spectrum so on the scale of one to five when you read Ayn Rand for the first time five is it spoke to you, resonated with you you saw yourself in it and it changed your life as it says in the script, one is you threw it across the room and then you flushed it down the toilet, okay, hands two, five, eight, five yeah I was somewhere in the four category you were a five, well I didn't know I wasn't supposed to like it yeah, yeah, it's a page turner it is a page turner, isn't it? It really is, it's melodrama sorry can I start and blind it, we've got a one here we have somebody fully awake, Frank, two when did you read it, how old were you? it's beyond high school beyond high school, just for the record internet people beyond high school for me it was very much the part about the critic in the fountain head, because the critic is described as, my favorite part of his description is that he is gelatinous eyes and as someone who's asked on the reg if I have graves disease because I had quite pertuberant eyes, I was like ooh yeah gelatinous eyes, and then I grew up to become a critic so it changed my life, so the thing about the thing about the seduction of that book and of her work in general is that it speaks to the part of ourselves which feels that we're being done wrong even when nothing wrong is happening to us, and like that ballet class, nothing was wrong, you know, I mean I had a star trek episode to go to, I didn't know it was Eden and that when you look at the internet at the moment, the idea of being done wrong by people who are not doing you wrong is the pervasive tenor of the internet common field and there is so the reason I'm so excited that the builders are working on rant is because even though they're not doing, as far as I know I'll have to ask, we will ask together, they're not doing, they're doing it in there in the contemplative table vein as opposed to the, we bought a house that was foreclosed on, we built it on stage again and then we projected literally everything on it, which you could like hold up a phone and see even more projections, so they're micro rather than their macro aesthetic that still despite that, as always, what they are writing about is the internet and they're writing about the way that our brains changed when we digitized the, but in so many different ways, in the tone of our thoughts, like the room tone of our thoughts when nothing else is happening that rant also is there describing the fragmentation of intellect from reason, the fake reasoning that is done, the fake intellectualization which she is at the core of, every time someone tells us that Steve Bannon is the intellectual powerhouse of the right and you listen to the type of reasoning that he's doing and it reminds me so much actually of reading Rand. Can I just throw into that, you know, Paul Ryan is perhaps a lot of people in the current administration profess to follow, I read Paul Ryan more than anyone and he's our numbers guy, like he's, yeah, yeah, yeah, and none of the numbers work, so the great thing, what I loved about you guys doing the thing with the Chicago family is that she said, you know, it will also do the accents I came to America, I pulled myself up my bootstraps, I don't know, it got Irish, I'm sorry, and she says that, but of course she didn't pull herself up by her bootstraps sweet woman she had a family in Chicago that gave her everything and supported her and then she cut off all contact with them in her later life she promised them she would pay them back and she did not. So one last thing that this, the piece brought up for me I so love the story of the unloved toy box the toy box that clearly warps and deforms her understanding of what altruism is. Altruism is so rarely explained by taking all your favorite toys, putting them into a box and having them given to the poor is that Grover Norquist, do we know who Grover Norquist is? Grover Norquist is the cat who wrote the tax pledge that you have to sign if you're going to get a full conservative, I don't know, pat on the head which is that you won't raise taxes, it's about the evil of taxes and Grover Norquist, when he was a child every time he had an ice cream cone his father would take the ice cream cone from him and he would take a bite and he'd say, this is taxes so that's my critical response. Now I wanted to now, because we have them here and they're captive and they can't get up from this chair these chairs until we let them in 20 minutes I thought, first I want to start asking them a few questions and then I wanted to make sure that you could ask them some questions because they are currently the experts in this so this is for you guys and for James as well Van, do you have any thoughts? Should I be asking? Okay, alright, so first question is another country heard from first question, your physically this setup, the aesthetic setup of this is so similar to your Sontag piece, and as James said Sontag was a friend of the company, but there are so many things similar about the two women, could you talk a little bit about how working on Sontag has informed the way that you see and work with Rand? So I think I'm going to pass this on to Moe if you're feeling inspired, but there's a line in this little workshop read through that we just did, which is that all this left for me to do is rise and I'm doing that with my straight line decisiveness, right? That could be a line from Sontag, she had exactly that kind of commitment, even the same tone in her self, she predated this word but self-actualization, it was there, like she was doing this, she was going to as a 16 year old, Sontag was going to go knock on the door of Thomas Mann's house in California and present herself and force her way into the canon, and she did it, and so I think that there's we've always sort of thought uncomfortably like yeah, these two pieces could be like toured and wrapped, despite the fact that it weirds us out to be putting Sontag and Ein Rand in the same frame, but they are like kind of important self-made public figures of the 20th century, and it's I think it's, well, now I'm talking myself into a corner, but it's fascinating and there's something about using the journals and these letters and things to show this process happening, and they couldn't be more different in some ways, but there's a drive that's similar. You said it well. You also have kind of the liberty to respond here in a way that maybe you wouldn't always because Marianne Weems, the director, so we're waving to the live feed camera, everybody wave, hi Marianne. Hi Marianne. Oh yeah, but now you can talk about her because she's not here. So what, how has she, so we're in the studio visit, how have you been working together? Can you talk about what she will make you do next? What, what, what, tell us the process of this? Well, we need more money. That's what comes next. As always, as soon as we have some more money, then we're going to push this to the next level. But I think that we, you know, this process we're sort of moving ahead, like I said before, like trying to move the pieces together. So like right now Dan has been working with us in sound and atmosphere and we're kind of, you know, basically almost at like table work. So I think that before we take this too much further, we're looking for enough money to get more of the designers in the room and start working with that. And so I'm not sure exactly, but probably not a lot more, just like pens and papers until we can push it a little further. And there will be visits to the Einrand Institute, which is in Irvine, California, where all of her papers are. And yeah, the mother ship there. So I had not realized that Greenspan so they, they talk about Greenspan being kind of important, but I had not realized that Greenspan was very much in the, in the circle of Rand. I mean, he's a member of the collective. And when we say collective, we mean when Nathaniel Brandon, who's her biggest fan, then boy toy, then boy toy and then expelled because he dares to take an objectivist view of their sexual relationship. He is expelled with extreme prejudice and Alan Greenspan writes him a letter that's like never talk to me and my son again. I mean it is, it's really great. So, so the that kind of the world around Rand, the, the cultic world around Rand, is that something you guys are going to explore? Yeah, I mean it's irresistible, sure. I mean part of what I, you know what you're alluding to is that she she married this guy Frank, who is an extra in one of the Cecil B. DeMille movies that she was a sort of rejected extra in. And he, she basically at some point started having this affair with Nathaniel Brandon and then forced all four of them, the two couples to sit down together and explained, you know, that objectively what they needed to do was like let them keep having this affair and that that was like part of their rational situation. So, I mean you've seen a little bit tonight of like the free song of like, you know, part of it is like that she's a human being, you know, which in a way she denied, you know, and so I think that there's, there's some interest there and it's a little bit of it is humor and prairie and interest and a little bit of it is like to tell us, to tell this story she has to be humanized, right? And so I don't know, I mean those stories are sort of funny but they're also kind of tragic too, right? I mean So the other thing, so they've done this project at the performing garage and they were telling me a little bit about the experience of doing that and the thing that struck me is utterly delicious is that people took the opportunity to ask the rands questions which they answered quasi in character. So I wondered now that you have Rand sitting in a room with you do any of you particularly the fives have any questions for her? Polite questions. Polite, it's a polite anybody. Anybody who has questions for Aine? Aine, I have a question. Yes. What actually works in her worldview? You've grown up to, Aine, you've lived through the last, you know, years. What works? What still works? Yeah, what for her, for me? Well in the end there was social security for you, for me because I had paid in, so I am not taking a handout, I am just taking back what is mine. Yeah, I mean she really held her beliefs strongly, like to the end it's kind of amazing. She's like, you know, I made my decision at age six, I have not changed a bit. I had this idea when I was five years old, she kind of says things like that and I believe it. Can I say one thing as a one time five? You know, I've spent basically my whole life since being 17, like running away from this and being like, oh my god, I can't believe I ever found this seductive, right? But of course I was like a deeply self-pitying, misunderstood, you know, gay, closeted teenager and she was saying I was like the smartest person in the world and none of those other people knew what they were talking about. Anyway, the thing is like digging back into this, right, there's a core of it that I still, I think that she was onto something at the core in this one way, right, which does come from her experience and that is the ultimate and perhaps only sin for Ayn Rand, right, is coercion, right, and violence and coercion against a person despite her kind of sanctioning like dramatic rape being okay in almost all of her books but at least in the philosophical writings, coercion is the ultimate evil and, you know, her arguments about taxes are like they come from like taking this little seed of like make somebody else do something against their will, right and that that little seed becomes the whole philosophy, right so I still, I mean I think that, you know, as we get older and the world we get more grays in the world and no longer black and white, you know, you start to look for like okay well maybe in some cases it's okay to require someone else to do something or in some cases we owe each other as fellow human being certain things, right, but, you know, her argument is that she's a philosopher and that you have to start from first principles and only move forward according to principles and not just grab things out of nowhere so there is this little element in there that I find sympathetic which is like yeah and you're coercing other people to do things against their will is wrong that's where she starts from, she doesn't start from greed as good so I'm very impressive I've been doing a documentary on the called observing the observant about the ultra-Orthodox Jews and I'm wondering about Ayn Rand's relationship growing up, how religious was her father, how strict, how much structure did she have because growing up that was her socialization that was a defining element, did you discover any of that in your exploration? Yes, I think there's much more work to be done there, her relationship to her Judaism she was secular Jew I would say the situation is interesting in St. Petersburg at that time, right because Jews were not allowed to live in the city of St. Petersburg they had to live in the Russian pale and this is part of her sense of loss I think is that her father was a prosperous pharmacist who owned his pharmacy and they owned the building that they lived in and because they were special they were allowed to live in the city so when the revolution came and everything was taken away everything material, I think that was a way more bitter loss for her but she did not, she was not a practicing Jew at all as far as I know and left it behind her parents, yeah right I don't know that much, do you anyone? Yeah, I don't think that they were practicing because they would have had to go to the pale to the shul now we're making the piece so one of the things that has come up around Rand especially when you read about sort of her very central position inside of conservative thought, there are what is it called, BBBN, it's a large company that has paid for a million copies of is it Atlas Shrugged to be sent to high school classrooms I mean this is kind of a Gideon Bible level investment and there is the thing that is to me quite interesting is that she is a woman, she is a woman thinker, she is a public intellectual who is a blazing trail for having a public persona which when they were showing me the Mike Wallace interview and she does, she absolutely has the scariest eyes, she's clearly seeing the future spooling in front of her that it's actually I think incredibly charming that she is a woman who has completely excused herself from this notion of glossy presentation and that she demands respect at this in these public spheres in a way that other women were not being accorded and honestly have not really been accorded since, she's not worrying about whether or not she sounds shrill you know she has a, there's something also very appealing about her as a woman and what did she ever engage with that, did she talk about being a woman as a leader did she consider herself a feminist, what was she like on that front she was not she would not consider herself a feminist, she thought feminism was stupid and a waste of time and she, yeah, no, no, no I think she did not, I think she wanted her gender to be invisible to be neutralized somehow in a similar way to Sontag actually I am playing at this level although Sontag I think was actually quite aware of her beauty and her kind of glamour but ideas first absolutely, like nobody is asking Thomas Mann or caring about how his moustaches trimmed or whatever, right, so, yeah I do think that there's something in what you're asking that's also connected to her popularity right now in the people that support her like in the national conversation right now, which is this antipathy towards, I think that what you said about self-pity is totally right, but like publicly there's this antipathy towards grievance and towards special pleading and I think that those things fit her too and I think that she would have seen feminism, she would have seen it as like, yeah, whiner is not her style and she's above that she's not asking for any special handouts, I kind of, you know, so I'm not agreeing with any of this, but I think that like there may be some clue in style as to why she's not a feminist and distance herself from that and yet, because of her belief system you know, there are many parts of her belief system that really goes against the grain of the current conservative movement like she absolutely believed in abortion on demand and she was an atheist and you know, I don't think, I don't know that the right can reconcile those things, you know, but that makes it interesting, right, yeah. So a dialogue box has just popped up on your screen, but the only option is I got what I came here for. So thank you all and thank you to the builders. Thank you. In light of all this, I have to acknowledge what a selfish act curating is. This is everything I could have dreamed for and I'm so thankful for you all. The last studio visit was the same, I tend to gush. There's another studio visit that's beginning in just a few minutes with Andre Zachary Renegade performance group, it's called Fire on the Mountain it's a James Baldwin punk band and Helga Davis is the critical respondent and I hope also you'll join us tomorrow. We have workshops in the morning, we have a new scholarship in Dramaturgy's we have six new works in progress, two more studio visits and a closing night party at VR world which is a virtual reality arcade and bar. So we have a long day all together tomorrow and thank you again so much for doing this and thank you all for joining us.