 Welcome to In the Belly of the Beast. Once we've been basically on hiatus playing old episodes because the studio has been closed. The studio just opened up again. This is one of the first shows that they've done. You're live in the studio again. And my guest today is Frank Liccardo, the artistic director of Hudson Theater Works. And he is remote, which we will be now for probably at least another month. And even though I'm sitting in a room that's 40 feet by 60 feet by myself, the mandate is I wear a mask. So I have to wear a mask. Fortunately for Frank, he does not. He's, I believe, in his own office. Welcome, Frank. Hi, Paul. How are you? I'm good. I've known Frank off and on for over 40 years. In fact, one of the reasons why I actually became a practitioner in theater, as opposed to just a critic, which is what I was when I first met Frank, is I saw Frank do Diver Madman with Cambridge Ensemble. And it was as close to a near-perfect production, certainly of a one-man show as I've ever seen, Frank. Oh, thank you, Paul. That was excellent. I saw that in a church in Harvard Square. Can't remember what the name of the church was. You know, I don't either, either. But it was part of what was going on in Cambridge at the time, actually in Boston at the time, as you know, because you ran one of those theaters. There were so many small theaters. Yeah. Joanne Green, who wrote, I think, the 98% something in theater. Handbook, I think. Yeah. She was very instrumental in the birth of those small theaters in that area. Especially in the 70s. I mean, Boston went through many different incarnations. My theater opened in 79, and it was a theater of the 80s. But the theater of the 70s, the three that I think of that I look at as the most powerful theaters in Boston in the 70s were, ironically, Boston Arts Group, which ran, I believe, it was right after the park. And they ended up existing until, I think, they lost their lease. Joanne Green's Cambridge Ensemble, which I think did most of their shows in that church. Is that right? We did all the shows in that church. All the shows in the church. And Reality Theater. Those are three theaters that I saw as kind of touch tones of that period of time. Yeah, there was one other named the Caravan Theater. Oh, right, Caravan Theater. There were a bunch of other theaters. I think Bo Jess was around already. But those are the theaters that influenced me anyway. And then the 80s in Boston. I started my theater in 79. There was the new Oralic Theater, which became the new rep or something. There was always the Lyric stage. But the Lyric stage did virtually well-known classics. They did a lot of Oscar Wilde. They did Charles Christmas and Whales every Christmas. Joanne had a tendency of picking shows that were off of the beaten path, I think. Yeah, she very much did. I met her. I mean, I was in this when I went to Emerson College. So I was in Boston at the time. And I wound up working. There was also this other company, which was very Grotowski-like. They were called Stage One. And they were run by a gentleman named Khalil Sakakini. I remember Khalil Sakakini, too. Right, right. And yeah, I know, quite a name. And it was very Grotowski. And it was almost, it had that sort of religious air to acting. The actors were, we did a lot of physical work. And the plays were created from scratch. So that's where I started working in Boston. I left Emerson at that point because I was starting to get work. And then, I don't know if you remember Maxine Klein. She was a teacher at Boston. Maxine Klein, of course. Right, so she wrote a play called Tanya, About the Revolutionary. Che Guevara's. She often is working forever. Yes, yes. And so I got cast in that. And not a big card, but I met Joanne. It was done at Joanne's church at the Cambridge Ensemble Church. And after that production, Joanne came up to me and asked me if I would want it to work with her. And she asked me to do Death Watch, the Genet play, and change my life. Not just the play, but also working with Joanne. She was, she loved actors. She gave me a lot of confidence as a young actor. And I think I feel very lucky in a way that I'm sure you'll agree with this, Paul. It wasn't all like Meisner or Strasburg. The idea of the physical gesture as a way to get to something emotional was just as valid. And at the Cambridge Ensemble, it was solid intellectual as a human being she was. I can see, I never worked with her because I'm not an actor, although she did direct at my theater in New York. But Joanne, if you ask Joanne any question about what she was doing, she had a litany of an answer. She really thought out everything that was going through her productions. Yeah, she was extremely smart. And for me, she was very generous. Just gave me a lot of confidence and allowed me to just take chances, like huge chances, and was very supportive of those chances. So we did a lot of work together in those years. Well, you're a force on the stage. You're not a small character on the stage. You really jump out at an audience. Well, thank you, I guess. No, it's a hell of a compliment. Well, thank you. There's actors who have this kind of rapport with an audience, and there's great actors who don't necessarily have that rapport. You're definitely an actor that audiences connected directly with. It would be hard to take my eyes off of you on stage. No, well, thank you. Thank you. I loved acting. I mean, I love to do it. I do it a lot less frequently now. But I did just do two shows. We did The Caretaker. And obviously, I played the older gentleman. And I just did 12 Angry Men Not Too Long Ago, which was a lot of fun. It was with a bunch of artistic directors from New Jersey. We're in it. So it made it kind of fun to do. But I don't act that much anymore. Are you primarily a director at the theater now? Sorry, Paul, but was that? Are you primarily a director at your own theater? Yeah, that's what started you know. Which is too bad. I sent Frank a script specifically for him to be an actor in. So I have no idea whether he's even interested in it. But it's definitely a piece that I see you in. Well, I'll look at it that way. That's great. I hadn't thought of that. Thank you. I'll look at it that way. Now, if we could go now, you left Boston originally for Los Angeles. Is that right? Well, what happened was we did that. We brought Death Watch to New York, as you know. And it was a big hit. You know, it was showing you precarious nature of theater. We were originally at the new where the New York Theater workshop is now on East 4th Street. And if the play was good, it was a big hit in Boston. And it was the nature of the space didn't suit the production. You know, as you know, in the church, we were on the floor and the audience was sort of raised. And it was an intimate quality to it. But when we got to the New York Theater Workshop space, it had that rage stage at that point. And people weren't enjoying it. And we knew that. And we were only doing a week of previews. And one of the other actors in the piece, Paul Domano, ran into a friend of his who ran this theater right next door. And luckily, that was available. So we said goodbye to New York Theater Workshop and packed all our stuff and moved next door. And the play took off. It was a big hit. And you know, you learn things as you go along and you realize how important space can be to anything that you're doing. So that was a big hit. And we came back to Boston after that. And I continued to work at the Cambridge Ensemble. You know, we did Gulliver's Travels. I did a play called Judgment by a gentleman named Barry Collins, which was an 81-page monologue, which was Hell's the Learn. And so after that, I decided to go out to Los Angeles and see what it was like. And I didn't particularly like living in Los Angeles, although I would get work. You'd get episodic stuff in TV and things like that. But I didn't really like, I didn't like the fact that you couldn't walk down the street and see people or meet people or run into people, which I love doing in New York. You know, you'll run into people, you know, all the time or that you could stop. Well, nobody walks in LA anyway, right? Right, nobody. And to me, the biggest problem in Los Angeles, and I spent a fair amount of time there in the 80s myself, is the people doing theater in Los Angeles to get film and television work. That's the desire in a show. It's like, how will it expose me to that? Whereas in New York, you're hoping the show will have legs and go somewhere. Yeah, and I think in New York, the audience for plays in Los Angeles is mainly other actors. Right. And if you get casting directors down there. Yeah, exactly. In New York, you're getting all sorts of people. And it's just, you know, it's intellectually more exciting and just, you know, the energy of New York and the people, you know, you run into writers, directors, filmmakers, what have you, visual artists. So there's a wonderful melding pot in New York of artists. And I think we feed off each other. There's also a state connected in New York, right? Like I worked with people. Like I worked with somebody last year that I worked with in 1990 as well, you know, which you don't see so much in other places. Like you mentioned Paul DeMotto. He lives in New York, I still, I believe. He is a Facebook friend of mine. He actually, I think he now, I mean, he still comes to New York, but he lives in Wooster, I think, actually. Wooster, Matt? Yeah, I believe so. I believe he bought a house there. Oh, really? Have you worked with him lately? I'm not lately now. Now Paul sort of decided from what I could gather that he wasn't that interested in pursuing it any longer. So he sort of, you know, left the business really. We started, we were attempting to do a few things together, but it just never worked out. It's too bad. He was a wonderful actor to work with. We had a great communication between us. So it was a lot of fun. But Paul also, you know, he started to get movie work pretty early on after death watch. And that was taking him other places as well. So it's funny how that happens too. I think the best actor that I ever worked with in New York is a guy named Michael Santoro, who is now a doctor in New York, you know? And he played, he was my pokey and my production of pokey off Broadway. And, you know, he's been on the front lines during the pandemic and more power to him. And he's a great, great man, but I miss him on stage. Right. When you get to be our age and you look back and it's like the people that are still doing it are like more few and far between than what they had been before. And I often kind of like Marvel at the people who actually stayed in the business as opposed to the ones that didn't. Because it wasn't. Oh, me too. Yeah, it wasn't always necessarily from talent or observation or whatnot. It was, I think more like desire of what they wanted to get out of life. Well, that's funny. I was at a replay reading at Labyrinth, you know, which used to be a Philip Seymour Hoffman's theater and somebody came up to me and asked me what I was doing. This is before the pandemic. And I said, well, you know, I'm still doing stuff. I have a project I'm working on, blah, blah, blah. And she said, well, you know, that one. So I responded. I just said, well, I can't help myself. And she gave me a great answer, made me feel good in a way because I certainly spent my life hoping this was the truth that she said, well, that's how an artist responds is you can't help yourself. It's true. It's a simple line and it's true. It's like, if you can't imagine doing anything but what you're doing, continue doing it, you know? That's it. And you figure it out, you know? I mean, you figure it out as you go along this younger director asked me, how do you do, how do you continue to do what you're doing? And I just said, you figure it out, you know? You take jobs, you do what you have to do. And as you get older, you still do the same kinds of things. You know, luckily I haven't had to do that in a while, but that's what you do, you know? You're always looking for that. You know, when I moved to Canada, when I was moving to Canada, I moved there to get married to a chair of a department at a university that was tenured in Canada. What university was that? Carlton University. And when I told Israel Horowitz that I was making this move, he said to me, well, you know, your career's basically gonna be over, right? Because I'd been working in New York really for 20 years at that point. And I know what he meant, and I also know it wasn't true. Right. What I was doing really didn't matter if I was gonna get 300 people on theater row, or if I was gonna do it in front of 50 people in Ottawa. You know? Right. Because what I did, I did not for the size of the house, not ultimately for how much I was gonna make from it. You know? And that's been something. I mean, I live in Portland now, which is 100,000 people. And I do nothing but original works here, which is not the, it's not par for what Portland does. Right. No, it's hard to do that kind of thing. But it is incredibly rewarding. And it has been my entire life. And I look at what you do, and I think you're also, you're living kind of the extension of what my life, I imagine my life is, you know? Right. Right. Well, you know, I, one reason I came to New Jersey to, I mean, I moved to New Jersey when my son was born. So, but I thought I could have gone, you know, I could have kept doing showcases in New York or things of that nature. And I, what eventually happened was, you know, when I was younger, I got together with a bunch of friends. One of the actresses said to me, you know, you should be a director. So I had never occurred to me before. We were doing a Sam Shepard play. And so I thought, well, you know, I'll give it a shot. So I directed action and was in the play Killer's Head at the time. And I really liked directing. It was the first time that my ideas mattered, you know? It wasn't just my emotional response to things that I was searching for. The ideas I had about the play and the people in it and the play in the context of the time that we were doing it, it excited me, you know, all of that. And so I started to direct and, you know, a lot like acting, I didn't get jobs right away, but we certainly were doing showcases and stuff. We did a number of them. And then I started to get work in New Jersey of all places once I moved here. People started to offer me directing jobs and it was great, you know, some good theaters. But I got, a lot of times you're jobbing in, as you know. So I was doing some plays I wasn't particularly fond of for, you know, some I was, you know, but a lot of them I wasn't. And I wanted to be able to do the plays as I got older. I wanted to be able to do some of the stuff that interested me. So I thought I would start my own theater. So I could do that. And that's what Hudson Theater Works has become, you know, a place for me to wrestle with the authors and the ideas that these people give to me and also to do new plays. I try to do one new play a year. I don't try, we do. We do one new play a year, which is, yeah. It's a collaborative art form, right? And everybody has their job within that art form. But I look at it as a playwright has to visualize a concept. A director has a vision of that concept. And an actor's the character is the artist that gives that concept of a third dimension, you know. And if everybody's doing their job and each of the players are allowing the other artists to do their job within the project, then you have something, you know? Yeah, I think you're absolutely right. And also, I realized too that I wasn't, I was an interpretive artist. That's what my strength was, even as an actor, is finding some way to interpret what was given to me. You know, playwrights create the work, but that's not what I was particularly good at. I think I wrote two plays in my life, you know. And they're, I don't have them any longer and I don't care. But I love working with playwrights, you know. I love the idea of, well, like you said, that I love the discussions. That's what I miss most about live theater. You know, we're in the zooming period, which is really sort of intolerable. It's the best we have. But I miss being in a room with a group of people and haggling over the idea of a moment and what that moment might mean and what the actor is doing with that moment. And, you know, I really miss that. I miss that terribly. So I'm really looking forward to getting back into the room. Zoom doesn't really allow for much collaboration. I mean, basically, people are doing what they're doing within the project. And that's it. Yeah. And I agree with you. I miss the kind of intellectual social interaction between artists. You know, that's something we, if we don't get back to, I'm just going to shrivel up. Well, yeah, I think I will too. I mean, I'm feeling the need. That's why I'm more positive about September than maybe I want to be. But I feel the need to do it again is very strong, very profound for me right now. Well, not the pandemic. And what's happened to theater? What have you been doing during this pandemic and what's your theater been doing? Well, you know, at first I would watch some Zoom stuff and I would just think not knowing how long this was actually going to last. And I thought, you know, I get stuff just so, it seems so flat to me and so uninteresting. And I was looking at some really good people, you know. And I, before that, I had seen stuff that the National Theater had done, you know, where they have 20 cameras or whatever. And that's fine. That's sort of interesting. Even though it's not live, it still gives you a feeling of what that might be. But we certainly can't afford to do that. So, and I didn't want to just do Zoom sessions. We belong to the New Jersey Theater Alliance and they have something called the Stages Festival every year. So when the pandemic hit, we were right in the point where we were doing readings of new plays, which is what we do once a year called Playworks. And I was casting a play called Bunnies, which the author used to be a playboy bunny and she wrote this play based on her experiences in 1973 at the Playboy Club. And it has very much has overtones of me too. And, you know, it was very timely. So we're in the middle of casting that when all this hit and we had just closed Hamlet, which for us was a big success. And we did our first children's show, which was, you know, sold out. It was great. So it couldn't have come at a worse time in a way. So what we decided to do, I had this idea of doing, I didn't want to do Zoom sessions. So what I thought I would do is I'd ask my playwright friends, and I'm probably gonna ask you, to just write me five minute plays. And then I would give those plays to an actor and the actor would shoot them on their phone or camera or iPad, whatever they had. So basically monologues? Is that where you're looking at? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Unless we didn't do any with couples. I tried to get a few couples to do something, but it just wasn't in the cards. So yeah, they're like five minute monologues or less. But, you know, I was able to reach out to people I know, like, you know, John Shanley and Neil LeBute and Richie Viteri and a number of other people who, Jack Canfor, I don't know if you know some of these people, but they're all really, you know, talented playwrights and stuff. And they were all extremely generous and gave me these short monologues. And I would give them to people to do. And it turned out it was great, you know, we released one a week. How many did you do? I think we did about 30, actually. Yeah, yeah. You're like pumping them out once a week. And were you sending them to your like clientele or? Well, I was sending them, we just, we would put them on YouTube is where they were. We put them on our YouTube channel and they were free. I mean, we didn't, we weren't trying to raise any, we had asked for donations that people wanted to, but we weren't charging any money for the broadcast itself. And some of them are quite remarkable. A lot of them, I would give them to actors I knew. We have an in-house company here called The Forge, which we meet virtually once a month and playwrights bring work in and actors bring work in and stuff like that. So a lot of the actors were from that. But also there were other people I knew from outside of that group who I've known for a while. And if I thought the monologue was right for them, I would pass it on to them. So we started doing that and that was great. People really responded, our audience really grew. So if people wanted to watch these, how would they do that? They would just go to YouTube and type in Hudson Theater Works and they would be able to see all of them. They're all there. It's called The Forge. Plug in on YouTube, Hudson Theater Works and they would pop up. Yeah, yeah, it's theater with an RE. It would take you to our channel. And there's some other things on there, but it's a virtual festival. It's called. So all the monologues are there. Like I said, we were very lucky to get some really good, well-known, good playwrights to write stuff for us. So there was that. And at some point, we're still doing it, although we're not doing it every Wednesday like we used to. If people have something they're interested in having done, having us do, we'd love to have them submit something. So it's much more infrequent now, but we're still doing it. And then I got, I was watching Irish Rep does these plays outside of actually filming a production like the national does or the Mint Theater also films their production. So they're releasing those, which is great. But the Irish Rep, what they do is they send an actor a camera and the actor films their part. And then they edit all these parts together with these Zoom backgrounds. Yeah, it's pretty expensive. I don't think we could afford to do that necessarily, but I had an idea. I thought that was really interesting. And I thought that, well, I had just gotten this musical called Elliot May from someone who wanted to produce it. And I said, well, look, I don't know, I was gonna do it as a reading when the theater shut down. And I said, but I had the idea that it's only a two-person musical. If you want to produce it as a filmed play, I could try and do that. So we did- Did you try to get like an acting couple or something like that? The story is about, it's about a man named Walensky who went on to write pop songs. It hits for like Michael Jackson and Fifth Dimension and people like that. And this musical is basically a tribute to him by his brother who helped collaborate on some of the songs, but really was somebody who helped. Frank, I'm being given one minute. So I want to wrap this up, but I do want to talk about a couple of quick things with you. Yeah, sure. Number one about the Irish rep, I think they've been really active actually during the pandemic. Because I see stuff on my Facebook page from them all the time. I worked with a guy named Derek Murphy. Do you know Derek? Oh, sure, yeah, Derek's- Yeah, I believe they did one of his pieces this year. His reading is going to be on the 21st on, I'll send you something, but you can watch it straight. He will send me stuff all the time. I did a reading of one of his plays last year. But just to wrap this up, if we do open up in September, are you gonna do basically what was the end of last year's production? I'm going to do, I guess, I'll do bunnies again in the fall. And then I'm gonna do a, I've always wanted to work on O'Neill. So I'm going to do two plays at once. Nick Hardin is going to do Yui. And on the main stage, I'm going to do Desire Under the Elms, which is a play that I always interested in. And then I'm either going to do ghosts, it's, and I'm sort of going through these people. I'm going to do ghosts, Lamford Wilson's translation, or I will do Martin, not Martin, Connor McPherson wrote an adaptation of the Birds, which is not the Hitchcock's, but it's based on the short story, and I'm thinking of maybe I'll do that. I'm not sure yet. Next week we have on a former actor, singer who is now becoming a rabbi, Jacqueline Grad. Thank you very much and tune in next week.