 Don Leesman? Don Leesman? Where's Don Leesman? I don't know. I knew if I called him he would show up. Don Leesman. We're waiting. He need to. It has to be all about Don Leesman's entrance. Don Leesman friends. Alright. Hello. Hello everybody. Alright welcome. My name is Wendelin Alther. I'm the dramaturg for this event, Evelyn Brown, a diary. It's been a journey. So I just want to welcome everybody to this talk back. We've had two talk backs. The first one was last weekend and just so you know that was with the actors and our fabulous director Alice Regan. That has just been posted on the LeMama website. So if you're interested, that is now available. So I encourage you to check that out. And I reserve the right that if you ask questions that were answered on that video, I'm going to just say watch the video. Is that fair? Alright but tonight we have a completely different situation where we have the fabulous designers for Evelyn Brown and two members of the original production team for Evelyn Brown at Diary. When it first debuted in 1980 at Theatre for a New City. So that is a very, we have a historic panel here tonight. So I'm going to introduce them. We will have some questions among ourselves. And then I know there's some really big brain foreign as people in the audience. So then we will hopefully open it up to you folks. So first I'm going to introduce directly to my right Donald Leesman, who probably needs to know introduction. But he was Irene's set designer for many years. And he's been with me since 2018 trying to get this puppy back up. And he did design this beautiful set that you can see it here today. So thank you so much Donald for doing and returning for Evelyn Brown. Next we have Gabriel Berry who was Irene Ye. Gabriel was Irene's costume designer for many years and also did the costume design for this revival of Evelyn Brown. So thank you also for coming back to do the show. We are honored that you are here. And I will note that their full bios as a member of this casting crew are in the digital program. So I'm not going to repeat them, but they are there if you want to see all the myriad things that they have done. And finally to my far right is Peter Littlefield. Yay Peter. And Peter did not work on this production of Evelyn Brown, but he was the original stage manager of Evelyn Brown in 1980. And I just want to say that Peter has been so generous because I've been interviewing him since 2018. And he's kind of my go-to guy. Peter, how many tables were there? What was going on? He's very generous with his time. And I want to thank him so much both for helping with the reconstruction project and also for showing up tonight and being very generous. I'm going to read a quick bio of his because it's not in the digital program. Peter Littlefield began his career with Irene Fornes and never stopped learning from her. He's a playwright stage director and dramaturg. He helped start the Pyramid Club. Fun fact, I think I played in the Pyramid Club. We've all been there, where he wrote and directed many shows. His work as a dramaturg includes The Mother of Us All, like Luriglas Opera, Peter Pan at the Fisher Center at Bard and handles Part Tenape, sorry I don't know the one, at the English National Opera. His adaptation of Dogtown Common, a poem about Bloster Massachusetts, which I'm from Massachusetts so I do know how to pronounce that one. Massachusetts of the Lore was recently performed there as part of its tetrosentennial. So he is still a working artist very much in the Massachusetts theater community. Quick note about timing and house staff. Our house staff are our Evelyn Browns and we like to respect their time because they work diligently behind the scenes without the respect and financial renumeration that they deserve. So we're going to try to keep this to about a half hour, maybe 35 minutes just so that they can get home and don't have to stay too late. And so without further ado, and the other thing I would say is we do need to use the mics, I know it's a little annoying but it's because we are recording this and it will be live streamed. So prepare your questions, but know if you say a question you too will be live streamed. Alright, so first question to everybody, yes. When did you meet Irene and what was the first show that you worked on with her? I know the answer for Donaldson. Maybe I should go first. I met Irene in 1974. I was an assistant stage manager for the production of The Seagull directed by Joe Chacon. And the assistant director had agreed to stage manage a production produced by New York Theater Strategy which Irene ran and she didn't want to do it. And so she sent me her way. I'd never done anything like that before. I had to be taught how to call lights by the lighting designer. But there was something about Irene. I decided that she was the person I wanted to learn from and I sort of became her slave for the next five years. Except for the fact that she did everything with me. I mean we cleaned out the 2nd Avenue Theater before it was theater for the new city. I've got a lot of stories with Irene. She was the most important person in my creative life. And I introduced Donald to her. Yes, Pierre introduced me to Irene. And the rest is history. And I introduced Gabriel to Irene. And then we brought a third in and Militello. And we were the triumphant. So when we were young, pretty and talented. We're still pretty talented. But Irene really, when we had our first chit chat, she was questioning me about working, working hard. Am I afraid to work? It was all about that ethic. And I assured her that I was there. Now I'm not so there. Tired. And what was your first show? It was Evelyn Brown. And it was interesting because Irene had finished theater strategy, her company, but had a lot of the funds still remained. So she spent $1,980, $1,600 on just set materials. That's a lot of money back in 1990. That's his life. And we had these carpenters who were real carpenters. I don't know where they came from. Some were up north, I think. And they built it like a house. And it had 14 doors. And I'm illiterate Doris. How many doors do we have? One, two, three, four, five. George Bartatius. And me too. It was a great time because everyone in the Upper East and West Sides were all renovating. Everyone was getting their pre-war buildings redone. See, we drive at night and George is a station woman. And in front of almost every big apartment, there was doors. We just shoved them in the back, brought them all downtown, and then put my sense together on what door goes where. We had to buy doors now. We couldn't recycle them. That's why we have less doors. We made the doors. And I'm very thrilled with what happened here because it's similar to the spirit. And it looks pretty good. I have to say, our lighting is kind of beautiful, like Christine Waternauby. She has the spirit. There's only like three lights in the front of the theater. And that's always a good sign. And then I introduced Irene to Gabriel. And here we go. Yeah. Pull it up a little. I really had originally done the costumes for Evelyn Brown. And Irene was perfectly comfortable doing her own costumes. And I'm not even sure why she brought me in, because Donald recommended me, I think. Because I did not get grilled. I just got taken on. And the piece that we started out was a visit, which was her retelling of sort of the Dwordy and pornography of the beautiful young cousin who comes to stay in the country house with the Baron and his wife and the young son and the maid and the gardener. And she has sexual encounters with all of them. Now, at this point, Irene was doing preliminary pre-dues of these shows out in California. So she had done this and while she was there, she had had this wonderful ceramicist whose name I can't, I don't know, make little beautiful erect porcelain penises for all the men and porcelain breasts for all the women. And so they were in a constant state of erection. But then I just sort of, I grabbed right with just a bunch of old lace and things. And me and Irene would just, Florence Tarla was in this production. And she was a wonderful old actress who I was just talking about earlier today. And she had a generous bosom. I mean, I have a generous bosom, but nowhere. And I had, you know, ridiculous things like doilies and tablecloths. And me and Irene just sort of draped them on her bosom. And I don't know how we got costumes out of that, but we did. And that was forever my way of dealing with Irene and arriving with a bunch of stuff and see what happens. And one note on that was the costume designer that's listed in the Evelyn Brown program is named Monica Lorca, which was Irene's alter ego that she created so that she could have an entire career as a costume designer named Monica Lorca who was a little known relative of the famous playwright, Spanish Lorca, if you know what I'm going with that. And I remember when we started, Alice was like, no, Irene didn't do the costumes, Revelyn Brown, it was Monica Lorca. I was like, I know that was Irene. So it's kind of a fun little fact there. All right, you guys have started talking about this a little bit, but I want to talk a little bit more about your process of collaboration with Irene as designers and how she kind of worked with you in the room or any particular productions that come to mind. Oh, boy. Almost every show I did with Irene, it wasn't written when we started. She was working on something, had things. She never handed me, I got a script once for having been square. And I went, oh, Irene wrote a play. There's always everything about kind of what it was or the world it was or the world it was. And I have a feeling I was like part of her spark that she kind of knew now she has a picture of where this is taking place and we'll keep writing it and rewriting it and rewriting it. So it was always interesting, but we always had a flavor. And it was always beautiful. It was always odd. There are certain things we did a lot. She always liked the space behind the space. In Serena, we had a high room that was floating up there. A visit was similar. The back wall opened and there was an elevated area. There was a whole forest of birch trees with red leaves. So it was always this wonderful and I just dug in. And we always seemed to be well produced. There was always money. I think she always made sure that when she signed that contract to do the, to direct and write. And we kind of pulled off beautiful things. And I mean a visit was a musical. Yes, it was a play with music. A visit was a play with music. And she often collaborated with wonderful musicians. I was one of the happy moments of my life when I got to work with Tito Puente through he doing music for one of her plays. My favorite thing in a visit was the one song that a friend saw you may know, Chris Tanner. He played the boy on, she knew. And the song was called Red Ink. And it was a great little song. And it was basically the recipe for red ink. Very irony, very found and elevated. The only thing I can add to this is that when Irene talked about you Donald she would talk about your refinements. Your aesthetic refinements. Very inspiring to her. Well, we would get things figured out and she goes, okay, now it's time for you to do what you do. And I said, what's that? She goes, ah, the molding. Time for, time for the molding. And you can explain that quote where you said her mother Carmen always called you the? She said, Irene Monday, her mother, she says, I was talking to my mother this morning and she asked me in Spanish, is the toy maker coming today? Do you want to say anything else about the collaborative process with Irene? Well, I mean, with all due respect to both of you who played a huge role in her career, Irene always felt that she designed her shots. Oh, yeah, totally. And she did. Because she conceived the whole thing. And also the thing that you were saying about her script, you can't divide her scripts from her productions. She was basically annoyed at Larry Kornfeld for not understanding what she was trying to do with her plays and she just decided that she was going to direct her own plays but as she started to do it she realized that there was a creative process in the making that had an impact on the script itself, on the production itself. I guess that's all I have to say. I have a good one to add. My favorite story, who told me, might have been Irene, but how she started writing plays. She was in college, she was roommates with Susan Sontag. Oh, they were just roommates. Okay. Yeah, come on. Susan was, and Irene was art-focused, two-dimensional art-focused, fabric patterns and prints and stuff like that. Susan was a little frustrated. She said, so Susan, what's wrong? She was, oh, I'm trying to write a play but I just don't know how to begin. So Irene, classic Cuban dynamo. Well, wait a minute, Susan, how hard can it be? Come on, let's think about this. Okay, we have a couple of people and they're sitting in some sort of room and they're discussing something. You know, perhaps maybe there's a conflict or something, but you know, and so I read, the more she was explaining how to write a play which she'd never done before, she said, oh, I want to try that. That was the spark. Irene, I don't know how to write a play. Well, let me just explain it. In other words, to show up with Susan Sontag, that's what she said. Get on the job. If I remember correctly, the other thing that occurred in this session, this famous session, is that Irene set up some kind of a game. I can't remember what it was. She took a book from the shelf in the apartment once they were home. They were in a cafe, it wasn't a college, a cafe. I mean, I've heard different versions of the story. Morgan's her different support, Scott's her different versions of the story. That's a famous story. They're sitting in a cafe, and Susan wanted to go to a party, and Irene was like, we have to go home and write. And Susan was like, no, I want to go party. She's like, no, we must be disciplined to go home and write. And then when they got back to the apartment, Irene said, it's easy. I'm going to pull a book off the shelf and pick the first word from this page, and that's the first word of the sentence. So it was a word play game. But Irene would often set up for herself some kind of puzzle, and it was a way of creating something objective outside herself in a sense to trick herself into tumbling into the world that she's starting to generate. And it just gets at the way that Irene was both completely imaginative, but also very logical and practical about her process and how to do things. With her when she wrote Drowning. No, no, that was later. There's also Mudd. Mudd, she loves swap meets, and especially in Southern California when she would be there for the Padua Hills Festival. And the play Mudd, which is a beauty, came out of a little wood ironing board she found there. And she said, this inspired it. And I said, Irene, it's so beautiful. And she said, it's found from heaven. And it really did. Mudd is like... Or Evelyn Brown came from an actual diary. The Danube came from Hungarian lesson language records. It was all in spout and swap meets. And there were things in Evelyn Brown that were found also. Like I stole all this porcelain plates and so on from the Manhattan Theater Club. They had a... Bohemian Benevolent Society had a cafeteria, and they had that really heavy kind of porcelain. And the doors. But I've talked to you about this, and I'll try to be very brief about it. But leading up to this piece, leading up to Fefu and the Danube and Evelyn Brown, these pieces sort of in this little period. Up to Mudd, let's say. Irene basically went through a process. When I first met her, she wasn't writing. And she put herself through a very rigorous process of reinventing herself. And she basically did it using the director's theater kind of techniques. And we spent long hours where she would kind of talk about relationships and what a car wreck they were. Because her earlier work, which was very clever and got out a lot of things, it was also kind of literary and it was a little bit derivative of the absurdist. And she set out a program for herself basically to break down her own inclinations in that direction so that she could kind of fall into something more real and banal. And these shows, which, you know, there's a variety of them in relation to a script. Some are more generated, directorially more. Are the result of that. And basically that took her for the rest of her career. This is the only show that Irene ever did that comes completely from found text. She didn't write any of the words in this play. So you have a diary, which is all of January 1st, February. All those dates are from, literally from the diary. Then there were two other found texts that she incorporated, which is the breadmaking scene recipe and then the Every Kitchen Needs a Box. And those, we believe, were found in women's home journal magazines of the era in the early 20th century. So in a lot of her other plays, she would use found objects as inspiration and then they would kind of settle in or become a small part. What's different about Evelyn Brown is she didn't actually write it, which is really fascinating because people think about her as a playwright, but this is really her directorial skills that are on display, right? Can I say one thing about this? The greatest found object in Evelyn Brown was Margaret Harrington. Margaret was in her playwriting class. She played Evelyn. Yes, she was Evelyn. That's correct. Margaret was in her playwriting class and she asked her to read. They were doing auditions for a Rochelle Owens play. That was the first play that I worked on directed by Larry Karnfeld, which was about a Chinese prince who turns into a princess. And it was written for Jeff Weiss. And Margaret starts reading people and Irene just likes her feeling for words. And in the way of Irene, Irene's always looking for real things. Margaret felt real to her and she basically bullied Margaret into the role that Jeff Weiss was supposed to play. He couldn't play it and she gave a much different kind of performance. But then Margaret became her muse during this period of reinventing Irene's theatrical aesthetic and it was all based on things that are planar, things that are not theatrical, things that pay a great deal of attention to the detail of things in life. And there was a piece that preceded this piece called Emma Gold. Well actually there are two versions. I could have this wrong but if I remember correctly, Emma Goldman kind of turned into Washington. But it was basically a piece where Margaret is washing herself and she goes through sort of a process. But again it was not a scripted piece, it was not a dialogue piece, it was a movement piece. And Irene was interested in the actuality of a person being in a situation. The thing about this piece that maybe is the biggest challenge for reproducing it is it really can't be acted. You have to find people, you have to find real people, susceptible people and I think she learned this from the director's theater. You put them into a situation and then you see how they deal with it. And the whole business about the staging at the end with the tables. That's just put these two people, Irene Passoff was a dancer from the Judge and Dance Theater. They were quite different. They sort of were almost like two different dimensions. They liked each other but they were kind of averse sides coming together kind of. And that last part of the bringing out the tables and setting the tables, there's something about just the day-to-day thing of a cleaning of a maid having to set the table. But it was also just to put them through that ordeal of doing it and seeing the effect of it. While we have the actors still here, they're all hella dope. Let me see your actors. I'm going to ask Gabriel what it was like to costume these two beautiful actors before they leave so they can hear. And then I want to know if you folks have any questions for them because it might be useful for you to ask them questions, right? So you think on that and Gabriel, what was it like to costume the elect to Ellen? Well luckily, or I'm luckily, I've worked with them before and I know and love them and they know and they love me. So it was always, they were trusting because it's a real element of my style. If you don't trust me, your life is miserable because I don't know what I'd be doing. So in this case, we had pictures from Irene and I also done a lot of research of farm women and domestics in the early 20th century. And so we knew we wanted the basic profile that Irene had portrayed in her production and for me it was just introducing color and texture and Irene for me visually in costume, she was always playful and she was very sensuous and so it was all about touching Florence Turrell's bosom. So I was definitely just going with the flow and we worked it out and they're incredibly good sports. I mean, Ann Bogart has trained them to or maybe it's Suzuki, they're, they're, they'll go along with most anything you ask them and hopefully I didn't ask them anything too terrible. I love them. Do you guys have any questions for these folks? No. Can we open up the house? Just gratitude and to hear you were such a lovely, wonderful group. I'm recording, sorry. I'm talking loud to you for an hour. Just thank you. I think we all go through it together. I think it's not easy on you and is haunting and mysterious and you're clawing for narrative or meaning or what is behind the door and when it opens what is it, what does it mean and I think that that presence with us makes all the difference in the world in the event together. It's just about the present together. What do we do, these little reckonings in small rooms in basements, keeping theater, it's pulse going, means the world to me and to meet these people I'm deeply grateful for what they've given us and also for the present, for the graciousness to let us do this again and bring ourselves to it and that's a lot for artists to give something up and give their work to us, to this generation of which I'm very, very grateful. And I will say this about Gabriel, I walk across hot coals to work with Gabriel Berry and those costumes are sneaky. Right? They're sneaky. They look very, oh yeah, that's a housekeeper but they're bright in a way and muted in a way, they move in a way, they're sexy in a way. I think she is an astonishing designer. Thank you. I have many more questions but they might go south so I'm wondering if you folks had any questions before I ask another question. Peter, please describe the baking of the potato bread. How they did it? Good question, I've gotten 25 different responses to that question. Is that for me? Yes. I can't call her. How they did it in the original Evelyn Brown, how did they bake the bread on stage in the original? Well, they didn't. They didn't. You did it in the original stage, Matt. I was, I was. So they didn't bake the... No, no. They did more or less what happened tonight. The idea was to present the recipe. I mean, you know, this is one of the things about the production and I think Alice was true to it. Nothing comes to an ultimate conclusion. Nothing is trying to reproduce, you know, something the way it actually happens. Really, it seems to me that she's, again, in the way that she liked to play games, that she would set up a puzzle for herself and then, you know, subject herself to it. Evelyn Brown was a puzzle. And the puzzle, the way I would describe the puzzle is you have a woman who's alone. She's a signal or a woman living in 19th century New Hampshire. How does she survive? How does she live? How does she live? She has to work. And in the course of working, she ekes out some space for herself, some dignity, some meaning. But at the same time, there's a great deal of isolation and there's just a tension between those things. That's the puzzle that Irene set out to do. And she, you know, she chose two players, Margaret Hamilton, and Harrington, who as I say, was Irene's muse. Irene actually focused on Margaret on her way to try to develop a theater that was more real. And Eileen Pasloff, who was from the Judson Dance Theater, which was about real movement, you know, folding and unfolding a chair over and over into all kinds of different rhythms. And the staging, particularly with the tables and so on, but also the stuff up the hall where Evelyn Brown is alone and Evelyn is speaking over the, you know, prerecorded or whatever. That's all movement inspired by the Judson Dance Theater. And I'd like to keep going on this and ask Dald and you, Peter, what do you think of coming back to Evelyn Brown after 40 years, you're more as a spectator now. You're still on the casting crew. What's it been like to see it again 40 years later? I love it. It's been wonderful. Our whole team, our whole team is wonderful and sweet and beautiful. And Alice rocked it. I have to say that. Alice Reagan. Peter said, she jumped in and tried to solve the Chinese puzzle. You know, pushing the blocks around. And it is what it is. Tonight, do you have any response of what it was like? I'm kind of curious, what Irene thought about this production, Peter? Clearly, you don't know Irene's mind, but I'm curious to ask you that question. It's really more a conversation to have with Alice, you know, to talk about it. Irene was a unique creature and she dug into the elemental in a way that, you know, is not explicable to the average middle class person. And I thought that the piece really did justice to her piece and what she was trying to do. There's an element of risk or danger of, what's the word? For instance, like the movement around the table. That was really odd in Irene's version. And because it came out of Irene in some odd way, you can't reproduce that. The thing about, they weren't acting in that production. They were just Margaret with her feeling for language and Eileen with her feeling for movement. And something raw, you know, in a way you'd have to do your own, you'd have to get your own, you'd have to get the diary and do your own version to get as close to that because there's just something existential in the risk that goes into creating something like that from scratch. But I still thought it was very beautiful and I was moved by the end. And, you know, I probably was a little resistant, the old fogey, well, it's not every... But by the end, I felt like I'd been through something. I felt the drudgery of the whole thing. Those two ladies had an escape. Those two ladies had an escape, eventually. Even drudgery was better than that escape. What I would have done, I would have brought a nice old picture of iced tea it would have been poison. That's what I wanted to do. But they had their escape and they chose even that life was better than no life at all. I love it. Why is there no winged accent in the narration? Why is there no winged accent? There's no winged accent. Why would there be... There's no accent. We talked about doing it and we discussed the idea. What? We talked about doing it and the actors decided no. I can tell you that there was no winged accent. Alice and I talked about it but it's not against it. I think it's more of an every woman situation. That would be too specific. One of the big changes that I redid is that it does know one person. It's not that specific. It's about broadening it around to be more than one specific person. That's the impulse of what Irene's intervention was with the character. So to make her more specific was not the spirit of the play. There was no winged accent in the original. There were no accents. The two actors were not from New England. You can't get an accent from a diary anyway. They actually went up there. They did actually go up to Melbourne in New Hampshire so we don't have too much more time. Can we get maybe one more question from the audience? Anybody else have a question? Scott, Morgan, Hello, nobody, and that's it. I just want to say that I just like to say that I saw something on one of the women that was like an image from the support tree. It was an expression with her mouth and I like and I do write sometimes kind of very surreal images and I saw that first I saw a grimace and then I saw a yawn and then I saw a scream. She was crying for help. And was there anything in particular that that image was supposed to define or is that the way I'm reading it like you would read an image in a piece of poetry? Everybody would read a poem and have a different version. So in the script it just just says grimace and shake. Those are the stage directions. So we practice that a lot and you know ultimately it was Violetta and Alice in conversation about what those meant but Alice can chime in here but I think it's probably about letting you have your own interpretation of what that means. I don't think it's that that grimace means a definitive thing right? So I think it's more about this intensity of emotion against this very flat script that then the audience can take away what they will. We need to wrap it up pretty soon but any more questions from the audience or is there anything else you want to ask each other? No? Any final questions? We want to say thank you. I have a question. Why don't you thank me? We just want to say thank you for doing this for us. Thanks so much for coming. I have a question for Peter. Why are there two actors? I think that they represent two sides of experience in anybody's psyche and the split and that tension is always there in the production. Irene always said, she would say I have these two women when we were figuring it out and she said there's Margaret Ethereal. Then I have Irene who's earthbound and so there you go. But they both deliver the script equally the same. And also as the production progresses the split increases. You have one person on stage and you have the voice of the other person in the heavens and you have time. Pretty dark glamour, huh? Unfortunately that's about all the time that we have. Thank you so much for coming and thanks for your time.