 And anniversary, and a place for the public, the program. It's academic, and it's theater, and it's a place where they go to meet. We have the audience, and us, and for each other. This is actually like, it's a start of a practice program. Examples of women sharing what it is they need to share and how they do that. There's no way you're getting more than that anymore. Let's have a look and see if we can talk about it. So, welcome everybody to the Martin Segal Theater Center. And again, thank you for watching our propaganda videos. We think it's like television, you know. You watch it a lot of times, and then you believe it's true. And yeah, but we are proud of what we are doing. And again, thank you for coming out on a cold November night. I do think it's a very special program tonight, and we have planned it for a long time, because we have talked about it. And Marvin have talked about this project for a long time. We have Marvin Carlson's book, a celebration, the first one of, I think, three. One will be at the Drama Bookstore, and one will be at the ARTA conference. And it's 10,000 nights, highlights from 50 years of theater going. Marvin Carlson really went over 10,000 times to the theater. And I think we even put it forward to the Believe It or Not book, but they said, we need to see the tickets. And we couldn't produce them, but they said he would be the record holder. And they haven't heard of anything like it and close to it. So it is quite remarkable. So this is a great question. What does remain? What does one remember? And it's a question of theater itself and of memory, and so much that Marvin has also written about. So we will hear a bit from him about it. My name is Frank Henschka. I'm the director of the Siegel Theater Center. And we do bridge academia and professional theater, international and American theater. And, of course, Marvin's book is really un-national, but also international theater and, of course, an academia, but also really on the object of study of theater, the performance bodies on the stage. So it's a very unique book. And we're going to talk about it. And Marvin, come to her. Thank you. So I also would like to welcome our delegation from the Shanghai Theater Academy. We have 10 students visiting and three faculty members in exchange between the PhD program in theater here and the Shanghai Theater Academy. And the reason is there is a Marvin Carlson Theater Center. And it's at the very beginning. The opening was just November 1st, where Marvin also was in Shanghai. So he is a world traveler. And I think also it's an important contribution in his work and life. It reflects actually what we all should be thinking about in global terms of theater, in terms of drama, and also on theater, how it appears in different forms and faces and masks around the world. And surprisingly, many things are closer than one thing, than many things are much further away. Then it appears. So Marvin, again, thank you for coming. And a great honor that we have you here as the first celebration of your book. And can someone hold up the book? So have you all seen it? So here, this is the book cover. It should still smell like fresh paint, that beautiful, fantastic print smell, which I really do love. And let's start right away, Marvin. Why did you decide to do such a kind of a book? It's not a biography, it's not a collection of reviews. How did that all start? Well, first of all, I must say, it's great fun to be here. As you all know, I love the Segal Center. I'm here a lot. It's a treat to be up on stage. And following so many distinguished scholars and artists on this stage. So I have to thank Frank for setting that up and his wonderful crew who I was able, for the first time, to watch them putting all the evening together. And it's really very impressive how professional and well-organized they all are. Having said that, let me respond to Frank's question. It was not my idea to write this book. Indeed, I don't know that it ever would have occurred to me. Though once I started doing it, I thought, well, it seems like a good thing to do. The idea came from one of the great editors in the field, Leanne Fields, who is in charge of the theater section of the University of Michigan Press. And she has published and encouraged and developed many, many important texts in the modern theater. She got a well-deserved award from one of our national organizations as an editor just last year. Leanne, three or four years ago, came to me and said, have you ever thought about writing an autobiography? And I said, no, I've never thought about it. And I'm not particularly interested in thinking about it. I can understand that you might want an autobiography from me if I were, I don't know, Robert Wilson or Tony Kushner. But I've never done much of anything other than teach and publish and work in the theater. And she said, then, you have seen more plays than anybody I know. I think it would be very interesting for you to think back over your career theater going and write about your experiences in the theater, how the theater has changed, how your attitude about theater has changed. And that really fascinated me. I thought about it for a long time, and the biggest problem was how to do that. That is, as Frank says, I've been going to a lot of plays. I have slowed down a little in the last few years. I only go to about 200 plays a year now. I used to go to about 300 plays a year. But I still go three or four nights a week. It's just something I do, and it's just a part of my life. So if you think of a career that started in the late 50s, it is, as Frank says, well over 10,000 productions. The biggest problem then is you can't write about 10,000 productions. What on earth do you do? And this is the part where I actually contributed something because the idea came from Leanne, and that was to take a 50-year span. When I first really began going to the theater quite regularly, which was right at the end of the 1960s, 1950s, and take a 50-year period, 1960 to 2010, write about one production each year, a short essay that was not a review, but really was a report or a memory of what it was like going to the theater at that time. And that would be, this in a way reflects a change in the way we think about theater, along about the 1970s or 1980s. There really was a shift in criticism about theater and understanding of theater, shifting from an idea of the theater experience as an object to the theater experience as an event, something that happened, something that was embedded in the experience. And that runs through everything that I'm talking about. What kind of event was it to go to this play at this time? And that means I talk about such things as the development of off-off Broadway, the spaces, the different kinds of theaters, the development of different styles of acting, with as many specific details as seemed relevant to that. And these include such things as the problem of getting into Segretowski, literally getting into the theater, physically getting into the theater, and so on. Or the problems of physically getting into Spirit House, Amara Baraka's project out in New Jersey, if you happen to be white. So sometimes I talk about going to the old automap to have dinner before going to some of the early Broadway or Times Square shows. So it's much contextualized, and the idea is to try to give people a feeling of walking along with me. What was it like going to that production at that time? So that's where the idea came from, and that's how I developed it. So in a way, you're responding to Wagner and Meyerholdt and his cut of a total theater. You have a total event that you, in a way, it's a new way, I mean, unusual way, I think, of a sort of theater review. The theater review is not an academic, I think. It is really trying to describe the atmosphere, which is significant, I think, to feel what was the atmosphere like in Paris in the fall of 1968, or how was it on the Cornell campus when Peter Schumann smuggled out someone wanted by the FBI? How was it when, Amara Baraka, you didn't say the whole anecdote in the book. It says someone said to Marvin who was waiting in line, white-ass, out of here, go back to Manhattan, and he did. So this was the end of the review. So it is, I think, a wonderful way to really think about theater and really to have the performance that bodies on stage in the center of the evaluation of what we do. But in very also simple terms, why should we go to the theater at all? Since we have 10,000 times, what's your, why should we actually do that? That's very difficult. Why on earth would I spend that much of my time doing that? Well, I guess this really goes to why we go to the theater at all. And the answer to that is, I think, a very complicated one because we go to the theater for a lot of different reasons. We go to the theater as we participate in any art just for the enrichment that it gives us as human beings. The greatest moments that I've had in theater are like, and I mean just moments, are like the greatest moments I've had, let's say, listening to music, where suddenly there's a kind of a thrill over your whole body. You think this is it. This is why I'm here. Not only here in this space and watching this thing, but here as a human being at this point in time. Now, how often does that happen in the theater? Maybe once every five years. But it's worth it. And every time, this might be the one. And when it does happen, it'll carry you through the next three or four years. Or it does mean. And I would say that's the top of the experience. But then, in addition to that, of course, there's a wide range of other payoffs from the theater. Being studies of human experience, it enriches your life. You get to see and speculate and think about people in various social, political, romantic conditions and how they deal with these. Nothing is more interesting than other people. And seeing stories about other people and how they deal with situations is obviously pleasurable itself. We all love to tell stories and to hear stories. And I think no stories are better than stories that are inactive. I mean, that gives that extra dimension and extra power. I love the sense of being a sentient body, watching other sentient bodies doing something interesting, especially when they're particularly good at it. So there is that kind of pleasure. There is just a pleasure, which is related to this, of expanding your horizons, just getting out and seeing another way of looking at life. And then, and this is by no means the least of these, there is the great pleasure of coming back to the Graduate Center and talking with my friends about things we've seen. What did you think of that scene or that act or that? And I assure you that half the conversations that go on among the students and the faculty here are, did you see such and so, and what did you think of it, and so on. It is a, it gives us something vastly more interesting to talk about and vastly more pleasant to talk about than politics. So those are, I mean, I can go on and on, but those are, that's a real no thank you. It's, of course, a basic question, but really thank you for sharing. I mean, we had Taylor Mackey at the last DTSA celebration, the Booth of War, and he came up with the American Songbook. In a way, this is Marvin's playlist, or Marvin's theater songs, you like. Tell us a bit about the process. Is it a new canon you were looking for, or what was the idea behind? Are you establishing also one unintentionally, and what was the process? Well, to answer to go to the canon directly, absolutely not. The last thing I would want to do is establish a new canon. We've spent the last 20 or 30 years trying to get rid of canons, and I would hate to be guilty of setting up another one. I do think that, and certainly as I was putting this together, there were a variety of obvious choices that I decided not to do. One was picking the 50 plays that I liked best. There are many plays here that I really didn't like at all. Many productions I really didn't. But I thought they allowed me to say some interesting things about the theater at that time, or certain trends in the theater at that time. I guess it's closer to a... It's like Taylor Mac in a sense, is that it is a kind of personal history of going through a particular period. But it is a personal history, which is almost the opposite of a canon. This is... And it is, as I say, it isn't even a matter of, these are my 50 great plays of the last 50 years. There are a number of plays that I enjoyed as much as my favorites that I talk about in the book that didn't make it into the book. Also, I did not try, and I'm not sure it could have been easily done, but I could have come closer to it than I did. I didn't try to pick the 50 plays that everybody would expect to see here. Inevitably, people are going to look at this book and say, how is it possible that you didn't have such and such a play? One could say O'Neill, Williams, Miller, Shepard, Albie, David... Arthur Miller is only in because of Dustin Hoffman. First of all, I would have to say, Miller does make it in, but it's after the fall, and people would say, dear God, why in the last 50 years would you pick after the fall? Well, there are a variety of reasons. We haven't even got to what was operating in my selection, but one of the main reasons for after the fall is that it allowed me to talk about a number of very important things that were going on in the theater and in theatrical consciousness at that time. And one of them is, indeed, the evolving reputation of Miller at that time, particularly, of course, his relation with Marilyn Monroe, and the great scandal about whether, in fact, the actress in after the fall was specifically modeled on Marilyn Monroe, and the whole question of how autobiographical should a play be. There's all kinds of interesting questions of that kind that come up around that production, but equally important was that that production was planned to be the opening production at the New Lincoln Center, the first new play in what was supposed to be America's Comedie Francaise or America's National Theater. And none of that worked out. The Lincoln Center wasn't yet finished. A temporary theater was built down in the middle of Washington Square. That was where the production was done. And this allowed me then to talk about the whole dynamic of establishing a national theater in New York, the problems with the beginning of Lincoln Center, the delay of Lincoln Center, the choice of going into the middle of the village in order to do this, what the dynamics of that theater was, why they decided to do a thrust stage rather than a proscenium stage, and so on and so on. All of this is the reason, or these are among the reasons, that I decided to write about after the fall. And I could do that kind of thing with each example in the book. No play really is in there because everybody said, oh, this is a great play. It is in there for usually a variety of other reasons. I guess probably the production that would come closest to that would be Angels in America, which really is kind of a pivotal moment in the American theater. But there are very few out of the 50 plays that you would say, oh, well, if I were doing 50 productions, you would have to include this one. I think the great majority of them, people would say, well, no, you really didn't have to do that. And in many cases, I had a variety of choices. That is, if there is one thing that I felt I have to do is I want to include a particularly important example of the work of certain groups. I do think that one of the things that characterizes the American theater of the late 20th century, particularly, of course, the experimental theater. I do unashamedly favor the experimental theater over the standard commercial theater, though I do have a number of Broadway productions in it. One of the things, maybe the thing that characterizes that is the importance of a number of particular groups, the Worcester group, or Mabu Mines, or Richard Foreman, or so on. I felt each of these groups, all of which I've followed almost play to play over a period of time, I would include Charles London's Theater of the Ridiculous. These are groups that I felt they must be represented. But having said that, then in many cases I did not take the play that I thought best represent that group. And there are several reasons for that. Sometimes the play that I thought really ought to represent that group, I had four other plays competing for that year. And I thought, well, I really need to do this, and so I'll pick them up somewhere else. And other times, the most famous play did not allow me to make points that I could make with a less famous work. I think the obvious example would be the first play in the book was really the first memorable professional production that I saw in New York, and that was the Fantastix, which I saw the year that it opened. And I think almost nobody would quarrel with that choice. But many people would quarrel with my second choice, the next year, which it was the connection by the living theater. And I think the normal reaction was why on earth the connection rather than paradise now? And I could explain that, but I will just say, in many cases, my particular selection of a bread and puppet play is probably not what everybody would agree with. I think with Charles Ludlam, I knew there had to be a Charles Ludlam example in this, many people would say, well, obviously it's the mystery of Irma Biff, but they're wrong. Obviously it's Camille. That is, for me, the great production. So in some cases, it is just a matter of personal taste, but usually what decides me is which production allows me to move out from that production and give a kind of insight to the late 70s or the early 90s or whatever in the theater. So in coming to a process, I think there was a report about the great American comedian, I think Joan Rivers, and they've heard about 10,000 note cards with joke, and like in jokes she had in little metal filing cabinets. How do you do that? Do you have notes or do you, how did that work? Ah, well, a good question. You think, I mean, people who have read the books say, how can you possibly remember all that stuff? Do you really keep extensive notes, and the answer is, no, the only time that I take extensive notes in the theater is on the relatively rare occasions where I actually have been appointed or commissioned to write a review, and I know I'm going to have to have a lot of detail, and I have a number of such notes. And of course, the plays that I did write reviews of, I have my own reviews. Usually, and of course, this differs production to production, but what would very frequently happen is that I would be thinking about a particular a particular group or a particular artist, and some moment or image would flash into my mind, that I particularly remember this thing, this moment. Maybe it was one of those these great thrilling moments that I mentioned, but it usually isn't. The, what, really the only thing just off the top of my head that I remembered in any detail about the connection was something that happened during the intermission. And that got me thinking about the situation, and then once I had said, okay, I'm going to write about Marat Saad or I'm going to write about Agents in America or whatever, the, the, I then went at it just like a traditional theater historian, that is to say, I went back, I read the reviews at the time, I, I hate reviews, I almost never agree with them, but still they got me kind of back into the mood of the time. I would usually read the whole paper, the review appearance, so I could get myself into the, the world of that period, including the weather reports. What was it like the night I saw that play? And sometimes you never know what's going to click. I would say, oh, yes, I, I'd never been so cold in my life as I was. The night I went to see after the fall, it was bitter cold. It was just terrible. And of course, Washington Square is in the middle of nowhere. There's no, as you know, there's no subways nearby. You really have to go out in the, in the, the worst area, not in terms of safety, but in terms of distance from any warm spot. So all of these things fit into it. The, many of these groups, like the Living Theatre, obviously, a number of books have been written about them. I would go back, I would read these. In some cases, I would say, oh yes, that reminds me of something in the play. In other cases, I would say, oh no, that's wrong. It really didn't happen that way. But they were all jogs to the memory. And the, the, as I kept looking into different reports, I have not kept the programs. I did for many years, but then they begin to overwhelm my office. But I did go up to Lincoln Center and get the programs, and go back and look at them, and that, all of these things, I could think of to jog the memory, look at photographs of the production, and so on. So, and, and as I wove the web of the, of the material, then I, that would bring back things as well when I was writing about each of the, each of the non-New York productions. I write about eight or 10 productions that are in other countries, mostly in Europe. In every one of those productions, as I was writing the book, I went back to that city. I walked over the streets and tried to remember, this is especially important in Berlin, tried to remember what it was like before the wall came down. What were the, what was the, what was the general feeling of the city at that time? And I did this with each of the cities that I worked on. So all of, and indeed I did that in some cases in New York. I went back to spaces that I hadn't visited in 20 or 30 years where, where I saw a particular production. And sometimes everything is gone, the building is gone, the neighborhood has changed, but in some cases they haven't changed much and all of that helped trigger memory. So it was a, it was really a complicated process and a great, a fun process. I love doing this. One could feel that you were so happy that Café Reggio was still there after all these years where you, over the 50 years you could always go back and it's still there, you know. That's right, that's right. So even someone said theater really is about what you see and what you hear and what you describe is actually really very close what you see and what you felt and smell. Yeah, let me just give you one small example of that. That is, I have a, I have a couple of productions in Berlin. One is before the wall and one is after. And going back and writing about the experience of going back over the wall into, into East Berlin to the theater. As I was going back and retracing that and thinking about those spaces, I went into the, there is a, there is a museum near the, near the Friedrich Strauss station, that is a museum of the of the Stasi, the secret police and of the secret points and so on. And in the museum, they have recreated the little booths that you used to have to go through where you were examined by the East German police before you could go on into East Germany. And then you also had to go out, you had to be reexamined as you went back out. I had quite forgotten that, but I got into one of those booths. I thought, I remember this. I remember this, the feeling of this. There was a lot of that kind of, of experience that came back and I wasn't at all expecting just to be in a particular space. Same thing in going in when I was writing about the Lion King. I went, of course as most of you know, the Amsterdam Theater is an incredible space and with incredible interior decoration. And I remembered how impressive the interior decoration of the theater was. But I didn't remember in detail because I hadn't been looking at it in those terms. So I, I went by somewhat reluctantly, bought a ticket for Aladdin or whatever they were doing at the time, just to go back and walk through the spaces. And I, then I noticed things like as you go out of the space, as you go out of the theater, you look up over the theater, the last thing you see in huge letters over the theater, as you're going out into the street, is progress. And I thought, yes I remember that. And I remember thinking when I went to the Lion King that was the only theater that had opened in the 42nd Street Development. The Victory Theater was ready to open but it hadn't opened yet. That whole, the whole rest of that block was dark. All the porno shops have been closed down and they were getting ready to, to boost up the, the, the that area. And I remember then I remembered and I completely forgotten this. When I saw the Lion King and saw this progress and walked out into the new 42nd Street Development I thought this is wonderful. It, it now means something quite different from what it meant originally. I'd forgotten that. But going back to the theater seeing that brought it back to me. So, so yeah, so back to the question, even so we, you focus on what materialize what you see or what you hear but also there is the iceberg under it of, of, kind of, of a theory. You can feel the, the, kind of the heaviness also that you carry with you as a theater historian. And one could argue perhaps that there is also a journey from semiotics to reception and then to your, your theory of, of ghosting which you could also help share. But is that, so does your work in theory, your theoretical, also does it come really from theater going as much as from the books or more less from, from reading the works of colleagues? How, how does it, what's the influence? It's, that, that's a good question. And again, this is something that other people pointed out to me that I was really not aware of. Joe Roach pointed, who read, read an early copy of the book said, you, you realize that as you're going through this, the theory is evolving as well. That you're thinking about theater in, in, in different and more complicated ways as you go along, starting with a kind of semiotic approach and, and as you say moving into reception theory and then as the, as it goes as the book goes on, not surprisingly, more and more into the effect of memory on reception because the book is actually ultimately about that. I think that's true and, and even as I go back and think about how I saw the Fantastics and how I processed it the first time around was very different from how I would see it today because just what's happened in my own mind and what's happened in the theory. And I tried to get back into my mind at those times but I never really thought that I was, that I was in fact writing with the idea of, of illustrating the use of theory. If it, it just, it happens to be the way I think and the kinds of tools that I turn to and unlike some of the other books I've written there's, I don't think there's a sentence in it which says now looking at this from a semiotic point of view or whatever, you know, it's not that at all. But, but anybody who knows reception theory or semiotic theory can doubtless say, oh well that's what's, that's what's behind this way of looking at the material. I did a, I mean just, just the, the example of, of how important particular spaces are, the whole idea of of having the, the, an archway that says progress as you're going on into the street. I did a book on the semiotics of theater architecture of what, what, what do all these symbols and, and statues and decorations mean in the theater. Quite aside from what's going on on the stage. So definitely there's that, that way of, that way of thinking. This is also a shift in, just in the field itself that by and large 30, 40, 50 years ago when people talk about a history of the theater what they really meant was a history of what was going on on stage. They didn't think about a history of what was going on on your way to the theater or what kind of a lobby the theater had or, or where you would go for dinner before or after the theater. They didn't think of that as as part of the total experience of theater. That's not my invention. I think the first theorist that really argued that seriously was Richard Schectner back in the 60s. But it is very much the way we think about theater now and, and it is theoretically inflected. But I never thought of this as a theoretical book. I thought of it as a historical book. I think also Gertrude Stein early pointed out that half of theater is the ritual of going there, preparing, dressing up, meeting the friends, seeing the play, talking, going to dinner, that these kind of social ritual that it provides is half of the, half of the soup. What I found also interesting in your collection, like the Nabukov who collected the butterflies or what a hoobald who collected the stones. He feels like he went with great care and described them and categorized them as was also a bit of a view from outside. You know, not emotionally personally. It was an agenda. But what I thought interesting when you go back to the connection is that there's some guy came to me in the intermission and talked to me and I didn't know was he an actor or not. Then you say Kotowski, which maybe you also could talk about, he said, come in and welcome you. So something happened and there were first sight specific experiences so I think it's a detection of a change and which you know I think often is not really so becomes so clear. So especially your memory of going to see the Kotowski work, I mean that's stunning what you felt and maybe you could comment on it. Well, I think it is true that in many cases I'm not sure that I thought about this before but as you say this Frank, it does seem to be in many cases why I decided to talk about a particular production was that in that production I became aware of something that I hadn't been aware of before. I haven't seen this in the theater before or at least I haven't thought about this in the theater before and I this is another thing that keeps me going to the theater is the surprise. And sometimes it's an unpleasant surprise but usually it's a pleasant one of here's something new I haven't seen anything quite like this before and even more pleasurable is I haven't seen anything like this, I haven't thought about anything like this before and it makes me think about theater in a different way than I did before and quite a number of the productions are that. They're opening up a different perspective there are quite a number of the productions certainly by no means the majority of them but I think a significant minority where in fact I have I am almost consciously not fitting in I'm going to a theater that is uncomfortable for me or is different for me maybe that's why I don't go to a lot of Broadway theaters it's not so much the cost as it is I'm not surprised I've seen it before there's a kind of predictability about it and I this one of the things that appeal to me about going to the theater is ridiculous is I'm flagrantly heterosexual and the whole homosexual camp sensibility I just found fascinating and being in it and being a part of it and and having that particular experience I just found a marvelous thing that Frank said that mentioned the time that I went out to the Spirit House in Newark when Leroy Jones Mara Baraka had opened his theater there and it was in a really tough black neighborhood and I felt already threatened just going there and I knew damn well I would be the only white face in the house that wasn't the only time that happened but I came to the door and was confronted by a big black doorman who said what are you doing here and I said I came to see the production and Frank mentioned this I mentioned this in the book and he said you get your white ass back to the city which I did that was an extreme example as a contrast let me say that I often let me say I went to a lot of black theater that was the only time I ever had a problem but very often I was the only white face in the audience and I found that kind of experience really quite fascinating I over the years I've often gone to the wow cafe and in the early days not quite so much anymore but in the early days I was always the only male in the audience always and after a while I realized I was probably the only heterosexual in the audience as well I wasn't aware of that at first but it got through to me but and so part of it in these situations where I this kind of forces me to stand aside what is going on around me here it's something that is not part of my world at all but I can serve as a kind of objective observer of it when I'm describing my early experience at the wow cafe the image that I use in the book is that I felt when I went to the wow cafe like a big shaggy but not threatening a dog that had come in off the street that as long as he didn't cause a fuss people thought he was kind of cute and I was treated very well but it was peculiar and so yeah there is a lot of as you say there's a lot of feeling of and I like to be in a situation where in fact I don't quite fit in in a way that sharpens all my senses of what's going on around me since you spoke of animals what is the white tiger you miss what are the things you say I really wish I would have seen this in the US or internationally what do you feel if you had seen it it might have made it into the top 50 well over the years very often as I'm talking to people outside New York and talking about how many plays I see I've often got the response of oh you must see everything and of course all of you in New York know nobody can see everything you can't even see half of what's on and so of course there are many many many productions that I wish I had seen that might have made it into the book I'd say I would have to start with non-American productions because you will see in the book in addition to having a distinct bias toward experimental theater and off and off off Broadway theater I also have a bias toward European theater and one cannot spend a lot of time in Europe if one is living in New York and so there are many directors many playwrights there's a lot of once Robert Wilson left the country and started producing more in Germany there have been many Wilson productions including very important ones that I missed and would love to have seen I'd love to have seen more Heiner-Miller work there are a number of French directors that some of the patrice charot work and so on in the United States I've I since I've been around I've seen a much more representative sample I think but you always miss certain things and often I regret missing early works of people that later I realized these people are really very interesting I wish I'd seen the first works they did well like Charles Ludham for example I didn't see the first plays it was only when he was already beginning to be established or squat theater or some of the very early Mabu Mainz work some of the very first Worcester group work and some of the early Richard Forman work usually once these people got established then I were on my radar and I saw them fairly regularly I don't know that there are I don't know that there are major works that I didn't see that I now think well I had I known better had I had I been more interested I guess they probably they would be musicals I'm more interested in musical theater now than I used to be and I didn't go to a lot of really wonderful musical theater of the in the sixties and seventies that I mean I saw hair of course I mean there were certain things that everybody saw and I didn't see if anything happened in the way of the forum which is the third thing but I saw that really because I was interested in Zero Mostel not because I was interested in musical theater and I didn't even know who Stephen Sondheim was at that time so it's there is there are just so many possibilities there's a lot of early work at La Mama that I missed some of the early Tomahorgan works and so on but most of the works that I think about that I wish I had seen are not really big famous productions but they tend to be more somewhat more obscure experimental work which interests me rather more anyway and you also didn't live in New York City for a very long time of your career so it would have been tough for you to catch it all but it is a remarkable what you see so we talked a little bit that somehow that idea of the real which you also then wrote about it slightly coming in what is real, what's not what are the words we don't like to work with actors anymore all these things we really followed early on and detected early on and you have a record in it so what's coming now you have seen 50 years there will be lots of students here that will see the next 50 years in their lives what do you feel what's changing, what's coming what do you see the next waves well that's a terribly difficult question because who knows what will happen and and the artistic imagination is so wide-ranging I do think that the last not only the last 50 years but I would say pretty much the last 100 years in all of the arts there has been a kind of a feeling that I think was best articulated by a dear friend I had a Cornell who was a professor of art history and who used to say the main question in modern art is what can you do and still call it art and there is that feeling of pushing the boundaries what how far can we go what new things can we do and each time you think and I think one of the things that we've seen as you say Frank over the last well certainly over the last 50 years and to some extent further back than that but especially then is the increasing challenge of the borderline between racism or theater and real life and I think the most recent most striking example of this are things like Jerome Bell's disabled theater and the theatricalization of real disabilities and I guess another example of a different form of this is what Nature Theater of Oklahoma and people like that are doing of real real speech the presentation of not literary not elevated but actual found speech and found material I think we'll see more of that I think we'll see more of inner penetration of audiences and actors I think the immersive theater is the tip of the iceberg there are already a number of groups in Europe I write about one of them in the book the Cigna Theater that go much further in this direction of really encouraging audiences and actors to work together to create a theater story and a theater experience really are co-creators of the experience in a far greater way than audiences have been before I think we'll see more of that kind of work there's no question we will see more of the utilization of of emerging technology more influence of digital work and computer work more use and there's already a great deal of this and this has been steadily growing ever since the 70s of intermixing of film video live video and performing body I'm somewhat conservative about this and that is to me all sorts of things to be thrown in but unless somewhere you have a living body it's not theater not everybody agrees with me about that but I think there's no question that is another area that is going to be more and more developed there is a a growing I can't say separation but a distinction between the theater experience the performed action and the pre-existing text that up until modern times a play basically was the physical reenactment of a pre-existing text that still is true and I think will continue to be true but I think we're going to see more and more other kinds of activity that are called theater that are much more separated from what we normally think of as a dramatic text all of those things are around already and I think will continue to change and develop and who knows what will come in in the future though it will doubtless be in large part affected by what kind of technological world we're living in well this is I think something we all will be wondering and we'll be excited to go and the reason to wait for the perfect game the perfect play for the next five years and something will come always has and someone is working right now on it and we don't know it we might not see the early work that is changing maybe Brad we could put up a little bit of the light to the audience so thank you for listening and I really think it's a rare moment to listen to someone who really has watched the field has been deeply deeply engaged in writing also and influenced the field Marvin Willie thank you for sharing and thank you also for writing the book for everybody and I think I remember on Monday when we did the Ron Water Roy Cone Jack Smithy when Ron Water said in the end in the beginning of the play he said we did the play for you hope you enjoy it it was done for you so the same as with the book I think it is for you so any comments questions we have a microphone so we will also we will do it so we hear you better but we also recorded and so yeah so one two and then three so but let's start over here and thank you and maybe you say shortly who you are and your name what you do oh hi thanks I'm Dan he me I'm a playwright here in New York and I was wondering Marvin your experience in Newark of being told to go back to the city do you think there's a kind of an irony there in theater possibly being only preaching to the converted or do you think you just chalk it up to a political moment in time is there a danger and if you don't mind a second question is did you see a chorus line and did you love it did I see what did you see a chorus line in 1976 a chorus line yeah and did you love it doesn't everybody love chorus line no I did I I've seen several several productions of chorus line I love the production I don't I don't know I mean I don't know whether you want me to elaborate on that or not I think what what particularly appeals to me in chorus line is that in a number of way well of course it is meta theatrical and so it anybody in theater responds to some extent to that quality in it but I also respond just to the as I do in American musical theater in general to just the the sheer technique of it it's just so beautifully done I loved Hello Dolly for much the same reason the new production and it is a it's a it's a very sentimentalized story but a very effective in its sentimentalization it seems to me so I'm not sure what more you want me to say about it but maybe about the Newark oh well the Newark well yes I think the first thing is it was a political moment it was at a particular time and there was a very strong feeling that and this wasn't restricted to the black community there were a lot of a lot of ethnic essentialism going around at that time of indeed it surprised me that I was always so welcome we're not welcome but tolerated at the wow cafe because again you could easily say that the presence of a heterosexual male here is not threatening but it's dampening it really doesn't allow us to sort of communicate with each other and openly frankly speak about about our concerns and this is not I mean this is not entirely a wrong idea that is looking back on it I could I mean I would have really been a disruptive influence at this was a slave ship as a white guy sitting in the middle of the audience said that everybody would have been rather uncomfortable I think they were probably right in sending me away so it's a variety of things but I think the specific answer is that it was very much a part of that political moment I was wondering whether the years you spent teaching at Cornell made it very difficult for your theater going since it was so far away from New York City well yes it it was difficult but I was determined and I was young the when I was at Cornell what I used to do was I had a frightfully old beat up Renault car which I drove down to the city in those days Highway 17 was not modern and so it took about five or six hours to drive down to the city first if it was snowing or something but what I would do would I would drive down I'd get up early Saturday morning I'd drive down I would arrive in time for a matinee on Saturday in those days this is the early 60's most off and off well there wasn't an off Broadway most off Broadway theaters in a circle in a square places like that had two shows on Saturday they'd have a 7 o'clock show and a 10 o'clock show so I could see three plays on Saturday and then I would sleep on the floor of a friend's apartment who was lived up in Washington Heights and then the next day I would go to a matinee and drive back to Ithaca that night so I could see four plays in a weekend by doing that and I did that a lot I mean I think back I was well I was young I was an adolescent and I didn't know any better you were a good driver I did learn certain things I mean one night one trip I remember coming in and seeing for the third show on Saturday I saw Racine's Fedra terrible mistake terrible mistake and I thought I'll never do that again and so I was delighted when in the 60's the off Broadway musical began to be popular after the fantastic there was Little Mary Shun's Sign Leave It to Jane Love and I would then always end up Saturday with an off Broadway musical and that was okay I could get through three shows but what that means is if almost every weekend I saw four shows that's quite a lot and of course on vacations I would just come down and pig out Hi I'm Brad Krumholtz I'm a PhD candidate here and Marvin is good to see you too is my dissertation advisor so we have a I like to think we have a little bit of a short hand in communication so I'll keep the question very very simple and let you make it more complex so the question is in the process of writing this book did you did it make you feel big or did it make you feel small or something a combination of that? I guess it made me feel very lucky that here I am 82 years old still going to the theater several nights a week loving it as much as ever and always having new experiences I just felt I never had I never wrote a book that was as much fun as this one but I guess I felt happy about it I don't know that I felt either if I had to choose between big and small I guess I would choose big it made me feel very good I didn't feel and indeed occasionally I would worry about this is something that Frank brought up I did worry occasionally am I creating a canon? are people now going to pick up this book and say okay now we're going to study the late 20th century this is the text we will use that worried me in that sense I didn't want this book or me to be big in that sense but generally the experience I guess was a euphoric one it was great pleasure to go back and just kind of experience these productions even the ones I didn't like very much like the Anne Bancroft mother courage which I hated just to go back and remember what that was like remember what it meant to have a Brecht on Broadway and Eric Bentley sitting in one of the side boxes like the grand Mufti presiding over this I mean just having that come back to me I just enjoy a lot of the book is obviously just nostalgia but that was my main feeling in writing it maybe one or two more questions or remarks so we'll do one and then two, three and then Hi Marvin I'm Karen Malpied of course Karen, oh so nice you could be here Karen first is not a question just a comment I'm grateful that you write about the theater and you are the most open minded warm hearted writer about the theater that I think we have in the country and that's really wonderful and amazing so thank you for that thank you and this is a brief question what kinds of human relationships or situations do you think might be explored in these very difficult times that we're in coming decade or so that's a tough one I mean we all wrestle with this of how to respond to very difficult times almost unimaginable times I mean we're not I mean it's not as though we were Jews living in Nazi Germany or anything like that but these are very tough times and they're times that our past experience doesn't help much with we don't quite know how to I mean you and I went through the 60s we know what that was like and we know we sort of know what strategies were employed and what worked and what didn't but this is sort of like the 60s on speed I mean it is there's a kind of really and I don't say this lightly there's a kind of lunacy about this political and social situation and how one responds to that is something we all wrestle with I think that the only thing I could say and certainly your work is continually going back to this is that we really have got to build up from loving and trusting human relationships I mean you've got to have that and we've got to have plays that deal with how those kinds of relationships are established and maintained I think and I think the theater is as good a place as any to do that I mean we're not I don't think we're going to do it by writing plays about what the president's cabinet ought to do I think it's I think as you know we all say all theater is local I think that yeah all theater is personal in fact so that's the best answer I can give you a care I know it's a key question did you happen to see the New York revival in the 50s and 60s of Brex, three penny opera at the theater delize with La Telenia or any reminiscences of that experience that was a that was a wonderful production and that was then followed by the Tabore Brecht on Brecht also at the theater delize I remember both of them very well they were very seminal productions for young theater people at that time you you may know that that when three penny opera was first done at the theater delize nobody paid a lot of attention to it and then uh Brooks Atkinson bless his heart uh who was really the only New York critic who paid any attention to off Broadway at that time mounted a kind of campaign and regularly uh after the first run of three penny opera was over what would often end his reviews of other plays was this is over a well but why don't they bring back the three penny opera with the result that when it did come back and I don't remember when this was very early 60s then everybody wanted to see it including me I didn't see it the first time around and it was uh wonderful very powerful production uh the laudie Lenya was was not in it the night I saw it I don't remember whether she was temporarily replaced by somebody or what so I didn't I didn't see her until Brecht on Brecht when she came back and performed in that and that's a great regret you say what else would you like to have seen I'd love to have seen laudie Lenya in that production but it was still a very powerful production and it was by I imagine by Berliner ensemble standards it was probably pretty soft but it it seemed very jagged and in your face in the theater delice in new york in the 1960s and I thought oh this is really daring and challenging theater so I was I was very impressed by and I think most people were uh the the uh uh from that time on and for the next 10 or 12 years there was a strong feeling in the new york theater that we ought to do more Brecht uh but that really only worked out in the off-broadway theater Brecht never really made it on in the in the main the main theater and I talk about this to some extent with the and Bancroft mother courage because I was interested in why was it that Brecht was so unsuccessful in the American theater and I talk about that in in that I also go back to the theater delice production just in a little in in very minor form if I may follow up it means you have to buy the book we want to have a book signing here so the answer will also be in there so I hope you will do that it's a special price and normally it is much more I think it's 30 instead of 50 or 55 but one last question over there and Marvin will sign will also sign the books thanks Ben Alexander um one playwright who I see is conspicuously absent from your non-canon is David Mamet though I um I'd be willing to bet you've seen more than your share of David Mamet plays um when I was brand new to the city in the early 90s and brand new to the theater scene um I was constantly hearing playwrights invoke David Mamet as this great guru and role model that we were all supposed to um learn how to write our plays like um and I was just wondering um what observations and opinions you formed over time of um David Mamet's plays and even more than that the uh the influence that he was having over the whole culture of playwriting and playwrights well the um um there are three American playwrights let me confess that I feel embarrassed that they're not in the book but they just didn't work out quite right and that's Mamet, Shepard and Albie and you think how could you possibly write a book about 50 years of playwriting based on America and not have an example of any of those three people well I have August Wilson, I have Stephen Sondheim I have Tony Cusher and I guess to be honest if I had to pick one trio over the other I would go in a minute for the ones I picked uh but as Taylor Mack says this is my 50 years um I of the three people I think that Shepard is the most original and if I had a play in there it would definitely be Barry Child which I think is a wonderful play. I don't think Mamet is as original though I like him a lot um I think that like a lot of playwrights his earlier works are the best I think he's faded over the years or become a little more repetitious I think that the uh that he certainly has left an important body of work and his plays will be revived although I think probably not as much as Alby's or Shepard's uh but you also point out a very important thing about Mamet and that is that like Alby less like Shepard he has been not only an inspiration but specifically an encourager of young playwrights and his he's made a very important contribution in that way the uh just the work he's done at the Atlantic Theater over the years in itself is a very important contribution so uh I am faintly embarrassed that he's not in the book only faintly but I am faintly embarrassed well um thank you so much but I think this is something we can all be very proud of to have her tonight and to have your book so an invasion for Marvin and his work hope you join us for the reception