 Welcome to the Martin E. Siegel Theatre Center here at the Graduate Center CUNY and to Prelude 21. Start making sense. It is our annual Theatre and Performance Festival celebrating the work of New York theatre artists of ensembles and it's hard enough in normal times to create work for the stage and for spaces inside and outside but in the time of Corona we all are faced with exceptional challenges and we are here to celebrate again the extraordinary achievements that come out of the New York theatre community. It is time I think and we feel to start making sense to ask questions why are we making theatre but also how are we producing it and for whom. And this is a great investigation again into the mechanics of making art in New York City and we also invited theatre ensembles from around the U.S. from Detroit and Cincinnati and Lewis and Philadelphia and New Orleans to join us and this will be extraordinary. Look into what is on the minds of artists right now. We also have many panel discussions. We have an award which will be giving out to honor outstanding members of the New York theatre community so I would like to all of you to join in and get an insight of what is happening. Welcome everybody here to the Martin E. Siegel Theatre Center at the Graduate Center CUNY. It's day two of our Prelude Festival. I am Catania Bonimaranka. Thank you both for taking time to join us. Anybody who works in the theatre in the U.S. and especially in New York knows who you are, you both are fantastic workers over decades and many, many decades in the vineyard of theatre. You have been gardeners but you also have been architects both of it and this is quite rare and I am so thrilled to have you with us. Prelude is dedicated to emerging work, contemporary experimental work at the forefront but as we know we need to look back and also what might be at the forefront today in 2010 whatever years might be a classical avant-garde and Bonnie and Anne have seen a lot. They have written about it a lot, they have taught about it a lot and it's an incredible honour to have both of you here to Italian-American, right? If I get that right, that's somehow worked out with the ties to Europe. I will just very shortly read a bios not everybody might be familiar with or be fully informed and Catania who also published a book and this is also the reason why I have both of them here. Both in the time of Corona finished a book. They were working on the important books and books are significant contribution to the landscape of theatre and they are not often talked about enough. So we have Anne Catania who is the dramaturg at Lincoln Centre Theatre. It's perhaps the closest what we have to a national theatre in the US kind of a royal court or a Chalbune and of course in a very different manifestation and she's the co-executive ex-editor of the great Lincoln Centre Theatre Review. It's a fantastic publication where they put out for East production a very detailed, thoughtful and I think also profound commentary in the tradition of blessing, you know, the writings, dramaturgical writings to give a little bit of context for the place so she made it up and Anne is the head of the Tony Award nominated Lincoln Centre Theatre Directors Lab. So many people all around the world know her, love her, adore her for that work over decades. She has brought thousands of young artists from all around the world from the globe to New York and for four or five weeks she takes time out of her life and talks about theatre. They rehearse and she brings in great contemporary directors to talk with them and it has been really groundbreaking and I think it's a great achievement in itself alone. She has been three times the President of the Literary Managers and Dramaturgs of America Association, LMDA, a very important institution I think and she was part of founding of it. We might talk about that later and she was also the recipient of the very first Lessing Award for Lifetime Achievement in Dramaturgie, Dramaturgie. We sing very highly of Dramaturgie in theatre. It's foundational. Theatre is an art form. It's about thinking and some people write philosophical philosophical treaties. Others do write articles for paper. Theatre people create something on stage. It's a series of six different and that's how it has to be looked at and not as a commercial enterprise that entertains us before or after a fancy dinner. Bonnie is here with us who also just published a book, called Life Timelines, Writings and Conversations at her PHA publication over decades. She went back on her essays. She has looked at... Yeah, Anna is holding it up. Bonnie, did you scroll Anne's book? I made a mistake here. This is the art of Dramaturgie and timelines are too important because I love the fact that you both didn't have your own books because you gave it away but you had each other's books and worked at it and Bonnie in her Writings and Conversations really looks back also over the decades. Two decades, I think, of theatre Writings. She's the founding publisher and editor of the OB award-winning PHA Publications and PHA, a Journal of Performance and Art. And Bonnie was one of the first next to ecological writing also to highlight what became now almost a fashion or it's like given that art and theatre is connected, the white cube and the black box, you know, somehow are different appearances, but there are connections between them and that we should pay attention to what's happening in the visual world and the art world, but also, of course, in novels and music. And this is what also distinguishes from many of the colleagues that really have a general omnivorous interest. Bonnie is the recipient of the Association for Theatre and Higher Education Excellence in Editing Award and she's the author of many, many books. She published so many writers also from around the world from Hannah Miller and Fassbender Ferness and so many others, but she also created performance histories, ecologies of theatre and theatre Writings, which received a really significant George G. Nathan Award for dramatic criticism. She's a maritah of theatre at the new school, even so we claim her a little bit because she got Hunter College and at the Graduate Center at CUNY, so you feel very close. Bonnie, both of you again, thank you for joining and for being with us and I'm so happy that we also have two book talks in some sense, but we will look at theatre now, the American theatre now. You have such an experience, you have seen worked with dinners and conversations with some of the most significant theatre and performance artists or musicians of the 20th century and the 21st and to hear what you think, what you have on your mind, what moves you at the moment, what you are concerned about, I think is a real privilege for us to know, first of all where are you guys and how do you feel today and where are you I'm in the city and Frank, you forgot to mention that I don't know technologically if Bonnie and I are going to be able to do this but if anybody has any questions or whatever, you're welcome to put them to the chat, they won't be live, but we'll be able to see them at some point, so we're happy if we're able to engage with people who are watching us, so Yes, yes, yes Just was about to If you watch on YouTube and you have some comments please put them in and try if we have the time and again, so tell us a little bit, where are you now, what's going on in your mind, what are you thinking about I'm just locked down in New York City I've been here for 18 months my theater is closed we're just beginning to reopen I have to get a PCR test 48 hours before I'm allowed in the building, then I have to do a saliva test, so we are not, we don't have a big staff, so even the staff isn't really allowed we have to choose days that we can go in and avoid each other and we do have a show that is just started back in rehearsal it's James LaPine's Flying Over Sunset which is a new piece, new musical that focuses on the strange coincidence that Kerry Grant, Claire Booth Loose, and all this Huxley were all in Santa Monica together in the early fifties taking acid I mean this is like way before the sixties and so he's written a musical about that and we its first performance was scheduled to a sold out house in the Beaumont on the day that the, that we shut down for COVID so we had to contact 1200 people from the audience to have them not come many didn't get that text the staff met everyone and after 9-11 some smart person on our board of directors insisted that we take pandemic insurance, something I'd never heard of and I didn't even know this happened until the COVID pandemic you know like 9-11 if you're not able to perform so that kicked in at 4-30 that day and so we were able to pay all the companies, the Acres, the crews all the way through what would have been their scheduled runs which in the case of flying over sunset was I mean 5 months or something and Lynn Nottage is into an apparel downstairs was performing that was due to run another couple to try and come back and you know things are back, I've had a couple of shows canceled that I had tickets for but I have seen a couple of shows so we're keeping our fingers crossed that we'll be able to reopen the theater which is currently planned for around Thanksgiving Thanksgiving, how do you feel about going back in the rehearsal room it's kind of strange I mean I I've seen one really sold out show which made me a little nervous and I've seen others not so sold out where I I mean I used to, I've spent my career of 50 years I started for the first 20 always sitting in the second balcony in the back and then I made my way up down to the main floor where I would get house seats and after all I thought you know I was sort of happier in the balcony so now I kind of like to sit on the sides and have strange views so I now move to where I'm a little bit further away from people but it's people seem incredibly happy to be back and it's interesting I mean I was biking back from Dana H which is I highly recommend and I ran into my assistant who's off who's kind of moonlighting on Rouge which is not a show I really like that much it was mobbed I mean it was just mobbed with people so I think it depends on the show and you know it's a strange night I meant also for you back in the rehearsal but let's go to Bonnie Bonnie where are you? Is that New York where you are? I'm in the Hudson Valley in Catskill New York and I'm just packing up to go home for the winter one day and luckily I happened to have his guest the other day who stopped by Andy and Michael from 600 Highwaymen who live up in Rensselaerville and as it happens they were going home on the first so they're driving me home packing up but I've been here They're going to take you back on the highway They're going to take me back home so I've been here so I've been here but I periodically go back and forth during the summer I've been here since this late spring and I also spent last summer and fall the year before up here at my house so I'm actually looking forward to going home it's a little bit quiet in the countryside it's not as social as I would like darker and cold even though it's quite beautiful so I'm looking forward to getting back into the swing of things I actually have a ticket for the Wooster Group on November 6 but I've been busy working on the winter issue of the journal we're just getting to the final stages of editing, choosing the photographs the cover all of that and I started on a new book also which I hope to finish in the winter it's a collection of Dick Higgins text which are really largely unknown and also his performance drawings which can be fabulous discovery as scores so I'm pretty busy here because I don't have to go to a place that's locked down like Anne and I continued editing reading and everything and you know that way of life so I wasn't going to libraries where I usually like to work just to get to a neutral place and leave home so anyway I'm ready to go back and see what it's like to be in the theater again right the mother courage I think it is and Bonnie I'm very grateful to you that you are publishing my chapter on the Orphan of Zhao the year 1280 that we did at Lincoln Center at the festival a couple more than a couple of years ago it's an interesting thing to work cross-culturally with such an enormous time difference yeah I know in the winter issue the essay from the book the art of dramaturgy will be in the winter issue and it's really kind of fascinating trying to work with actors describing the book to get past the psychology and the psychological and method training to work on something that's based like on song and gesture and that's a fascinating story so that was the chapter I chose and Anne also recommended to have in the winter issue so I'm glad to do that Anne and I actually first met in the 70s and it's an interesting bit of news because we were the first two literary managers in New York City because the New York State Arts Council had started a pilot program for literary managers and we were the first two around the middle of the 70s and Anne was at the theater and I was at the American Place so we go back a while and I don't know if there were others but we got some NISCA we were the first two for that pilot program do you think there were literary managers before that in New York? I don't recall I mean Rod Marriott was at Circle and Lynn Holtz and Morgan Genes were at the public and there were people around I don't know still you both were pioneers who were on that pilot program that was funded that's true now one of the things that I've been trying and failing to do is to create a Wikipedia page for American dramaturgy just to document it and I reached out to about 40 dramaturgs to add information just because several major dramaturgs have died in the last few years Mickey, Michael Lupu at the Guthrie passed away, Doug Langworthy, Robert Blacker who founded Sundance, I mean some important people and you hate to lose the knowledge of their existence so anyway everybody filled in everything it's a right now it's a Google Doc of about 40 pages and it has a bit of history in the United States going back through the Federal Theater Project, Marco Jones and then obviously a little bit in England and then a bit in Germany you can't avoid that in dramaturgy but it's mostly about American dramaturgy and let the English do their own and the Canadians do their own and the Germans will issue an encyclopedia but this is just a Wikipedia site but mostly what it does is it lists all the staff dramaturgs who are working to answer your question Bonnie, back in the 70s where they were working and then after that it lists it goes from 1970 to 2000 and then 2000 to 2020 it lists all the productions where dramaturgs were credited in other words all the productions that dramaturgs worked on by contract type so you know Broadway off, Broadway off, off, Broadway and then all the regional Lord Theater etc. and everything on Wikipedia which is not normally my favorite go to site but now it's like if you don't if you're not on Wikipedia you don't exist all the productions are linked, you have to be linked so they're all taken care of you can you know look in a Broadway database and see your name as the dramaturg or link to a theater but no dramaturgs have websites we haven't been able to get this live because dramaturgs are by nature somewhat self-effacing and I mean I think that's true so nobody's done I'm a dramaturg website so we're forcing people to make rudimentary websites so we can get this on the on the internet but we haven't made any and there's a history you know of the craft of dramaturgy typical literary management but it's a much bigger field also moved into dance and so much so both of you created books in a time of corona we know when you're in times of hunger you dream about food you think about food people I think in camps perform dinners without anything on the table what did theater mean for you while you were working on your books what came to your mind in that time was no theater on stages maybe Bonnie we start with you I guess while I was writing the preface after I finished the book or after I put all the material together in the book and I was writing the preface partly here in Catskill and thinking about you know history and time and I should say one of the things I've done in recent years is I've tried to introduce the element of time in my writing to have a sense of immediacy and I've always based the writing on the voice so I kind of started you know working on this sitting by the river and thinking about Catskill and the historical aspect of Catskill and the river and many things that were also current in the historical setting for example Alexander Hamilton had lived nearby in Albany where Roosevelt was you know from Hyde Park so a lot of these people in different things and events were mentioned also at the same time that hooked into things right here in the Hudson Valley and then I would go back to New York and I would finish parts of it there but you know I mean at all times and also at this stage in my life I you know you think about you know the value of work through time and you know I had already chosen the title Timelines but I realized also going back through the book how much time does play a part and how and you know in the book and how much and through different pieces that I have introduced the element of time by which I mean talking about where I am and what's going on or what I'm doing or what I'm thinking as I'm writing so the question of time and the question of doing the book I don't know whether the work became more relevant because of our pandemic situation or less relevant to the times and I concluded that all kinds of artworks and all kinds of text and writing eventually you know live their own lives in the world and I really couldn't control or it didn't matter what this meaningfulness was that the works would live their own lives in the world but the questions that arise are really what kind of theater do we want to see or make after this period of time given the conditions of pandemic also for many people it was also a slow time in terms of really thinking about the hectic way that people live and needing to slow down I've been writing for many years about the slow philosophy and the importance of doing that rather than the constant networking of people and running from thing to thing I've become also less interested in these times in artistic process and more interested in people discussing what they do and the resonance in other words the why of it rather than the how of it because people are so focused on how they did something what they did and you don't really know why people are attracted to certain topics or certain stories and things beyond themselves so those were some of the questions I asked I wondered also about new forms of writing my own also I've been working on a kind of form criticism with text and an image but also I wonder what kind of forms will artists create out of this period are we going to have just new stories in the same old format will we have new kinds of staging I'm often disappointed because a lot of the staging looks to me like it did when I first came to New York and I wonder how I'm directing and productions will advance do people care anymore about experimental theater or any notion of an avant-garde do people want to make art or do they want to make culture is the ultimate question now I think and I ask myself that's my big question that would fill I think a week of Stiegel talks and Bonnie talked about time going back for you through in a way through your career on significant works in theater you worked on as the dramaturg as someone said is almost like a Sherpa or someone who you know goes in the mountains with the climbers but they know the terrain they know what to do they know when it gets cold when it gets when it's the time to go and reach a knot and you can't do it without them so how was that for you to go back in time and tell us a bit about it you're quoting maybe you know this or not the great director leave you truly who used to always say if you're climbing Mount Everest why not take all the help you can get oh yeah that's true right that's true I wrote this book I was asked to write this book by Yale before the pandemic and I spent the pandemic in the really fun part of the book where I would copy edit and you know do all of higher indexers so it actually was largely conceived before the pandemic and just to answer your question I would say that the one thing that has characterized my life at the theater is that I've always been very curious and open to other voices and other voices of living people and voices of people from the past and I've incorporated them into my work as I say in the book every play that I've done by every production I've worked on by Shakespeare I always have an old school old style Shakespeare very orum in the rehearsal room which is this giant book that you have to get it now at a rare bookstore it's not the new short paperback version but the big one and at the top of every page is one line and then the rest of the whole page is what everybody thought about it from the time of Shakespeare on and that includes of course the most important people who bring Shakespeare down the ages to us, actors that includes people who pretend that they're related to Shakespeare every scholar and editor of every version of Shakespeare absolutely everybody who had anything to say about that line is in that book it's an invaluable resource to have and I think whether you're talking about Shakespeare or you're talking about people from our own century it's so interesting to hear what other people have made of things because you're making a production that's modern, that's your own that is referring to what's happening but you don't want to be limited by yourself you want to bring everyone in not only the company, not only of course all your collaborators but everything that you could find from the past and so one of my challenges in the book was to pick a variety of plays that had different challenges, different time periods and then the key thing which we both know which is the sort of secret of John Vergey is to interpret a text and the great directors certainly of our era we old ones you know who were masters of taking a play and finding a way of making it incredibly relevant, incredibly modern it was like it was written yesterday which is an extremely difficult thing to do and so I set myself the task of trying to describe how that is done I even wrote a little curriculum to try and train people how to do it or show people how to approach it because that's such that's the most wonderfully fun thing in the world it's just thrilling and I hope I hope that opening that up which I was given by some very famous dramaturgs in Europe who work with Peter Stein can pass it on to people who are curious doing it so it's kind of like widening the circle to the future in the past, nothing in the book, nothing that I've done will last, nothing should be done like what I'm describing in the book but it's a sort of how to build a building model that somebody will use to build their own building that will look totally different I just thought I would like put that all out in case somebody was interested I have to say also that the book is really lively and clear and very detailed but it also shows over a lifetime how important it is to have relationships with artists to support them through a lifetime and I was also struck I told Dan by the comparisons between being an editor and being a dramaturg we're both involved in discovery and rediscovery and archive and legacy all those kinds of things and helping writers and artists support their work in a way long before people began to talk about care these are real care professions in a way because you're at the service of helping other people realize their work personally I would have been writing much more if I had more if I didn't spend so much time with all the people who's writing publishing so editing takes a lot of time editing and publishing you're in service to getting other people's work realized in the same way as a dramaturg you spend so much time helping people realize their works on the stage but finding forgotten or neglected authors or helping authors who should be more known than they are those are all in the service of people but they're all very caring professions in a way where you have to stand back apart from yourself in a sense and work with other people and it's part of this vast ecosystem that people sometimes forget about the booksellers the press agents, the literary agents the producers the dramaturgs the press, all of that instead of all these warring factions I think it's important to see that this is an entire ecosystem that we're involved in and sometimes you don't realize that when you're in the beginning or starting out or busy working but if you look back over a lifetime and think what is your life worth what have you done, what could you have done what things you didn't do things like that just reflecting as you do at this time in life it's really these kinds of things that are most important the relationships, how you worked in the field what you did what you did to advance the profession, things like that yeah you both did extraordinary work actually today also the prelude artists and curators talk a lot about healing about caring connection in a way to nature something that's bigger and that you need to have that actually also to be a real artist and not as culture so we appreciate what we do as art I would love to have a book talk with both of you and our single talk maybe in November December but I would like to ask you now honest question and open question also about theater and performance you both care so deeply you actually devoted your life and your life's energy to it you made a difference in the way you help people presented it and what you in Bonnie's work what you preserved for future generations in Ann's case that you shaped it in a form like say people say diamond, you know you find a raw diamond you have to cut 60 to 70% off and you have to cut it in a certain way so more light comes out that comes in that's why it's brilliant and that's what Ann did so what do you think about theater now what are you concerned about because we are all nobody has real answers now in the moment but what do you feel is troubling what do we need to do and it's a free and open question I know but hear from both of you was that real experience get the crap on the moment we have but also look a bit forward do you want to go first or shall I jump in if you make sure I don't mind I since it's been a while since I finished the book even though I had to keep doing all these indexing type I mean I had an indexer but I had to do all those stuff for the production I had time to think about it and I think right now what I'm feeling the strongest is that I have come to the strong conclusion that theater consists and it has from 2500 BC it's a kind of tribe of people who have a tradition of working together who are good at collaboration I mean there's always that cliché of the you know superstar artists who wants attention but actually all the superstar artists I've worked with are the most generous people I've ever met they're just leaders of the company but we we live outside of society to some degree that's the way it's been we weren't allowed to be buried even in this country 100 years ago when you see Hamlet's players pull up to Elsinore they're there because the plagues in London but he treats them as equals and they treat him as equals but theater doesn't have any security maybe Moliere was having dinner with the king one night but a month later he was pulling it to Wagon in France so to me the tradition of theater the tribal element the fact that it's handed down from one generation of actors to the next that you learn how to be a theater person is something that I'm I feel strongly needs to be preserved it is a profession without security other than artistic security and friendships and collaboration which we all happen to be very very good at and I worry about what I worry about right now is I don't know if you can go into the theater if you have debt I don't have a lot of money I mean I've done I've been successful but I don't have I'm not a trust fund or anything like that but I think that people who are now going through universities I was just reading an article in the paper this morning with enormous endowments I mean the university endowments in this country have doubled or something in this current year and yet people are not paid in universities they come out with debt they're just going to go right to TV they have to because they can't you can never make money in the theater I mean you can make occasionally a lot of money if you're having a phone but then you don't work for a while I mean it's not a secure life and people in the theater don't want to secure life that's their thing so I'm worried about people who are training in places that have a ton of money but come out with so much debt are they going to stay in the theater or is this just a kind of way station to get a lot of attention and go and get a series in LA and and Bonnie and I are old enough that we actually did study which is unusual because I worked with a lot of people who came up through conservatories and trained in the theater so they took their models from working actors and working directors and working designers that's the way it's always been in the history of theater until we reinvented things in the 70s but even our tuition was virtually nothing so we didn't have to pay it down or we did very quickly and that gave us a freedom to go on employment or work with some nutcase who turned out to be brilliant and I don't know whether if you have those financial responsibilities it's as easy for you so I'm kind of in a mode where I'm thinking it would be great if theaters reinstated their conservatories and people could train with working actors working directors, working designers working administrators the way that it has been this apprentice tradition at the beginning of time so that's what's on my mind so you feel that that old model of Guter wrote about in Wilhelm Meisters you know where he learned about theater he follows this theater company and it becomes formative the word playwright it comes from WRI like a wheelwright you learn how to make a wheel or you learn how to be a Miller or be an artist you know by working in a workshop where you learn from somebody who knows how to do it and then you develop your own style which might be the opposite of the person that you work with but it's not that you're learning only the art you're learning the life you're learning the way of being that's important and that's something I can tell you funny what do I think about what am I thinking about now when you think about theater performance what concerns you what concerns me is just the nature of theater itself I would like to see more works of the imagination I would like to see less of a journalistic theater that's just making statements about politics and just being satisfied that that's enough there's a reality art works have a reality that they create and the world outside is another reality I just think that people have turned away from imagination in a sense and I spend a lot of time duplicating global crises on a kind of local sense and so much of it is just a kind of lamentation and I feel that even in the worst time if you think of the theater between two world wars the imagination of catastrophe even the fourth great imaginative works thinking of Bidkiewicz especially the Polish theater or the German theater so it's not that I'm telling people I'm thinking that people should turn away from crises but be more theatrical and imaginative in terms of responses also I miss the kind of poetry or privacy in the theater as well I can enjoy that as much as I can I don't know where theater will go I think the impact of the pandemic and the digital and people working on zoom I don't know how much people how the definition of live will change or what we would consider theater like people talk about digital theater zoom theater all of that what will be funded will you be able to get theater funding if you're just working on a computer on the computer a lot of people I spoke to really couldn't stand watching a lot of theater on the screen though other people enjoyed archival performances or historical performances for example but for theater people it's really not the same to sit in front of a computer and watch something but will other generations change that notion of the live I don't know there's such a focus on contemporary because the curriculums have changed so much and they focus on the contemporary when I was in graduate school you didn't really study the contemporary you studied the past and you studied other cultures and countries and everything but now there's such a focus on the curriculum and contemporary culture that I'm worried that people won't have the knowledge that it takes to really produce great artworks and I don't know what the situation in academia will be because everything is like feeding the system and what's the point of having all this theater training and then just trying to get into Netflix to do something I mean in a way the theater in the 60s gave up what later became Netflix and Amazon type pieces psychological acting, the story the theater gave that up in the 60s and moved toward the avant-garde and now it's a very conservative period in a way with the domination of stories and narrative and strong psychology so I'm not sure where we're going or where there will be room for real experimentation I don't find there's much discussion about that now and there's more discussion of stories so the kind of theater that I would like to see as I said is a more poetic philosophical deep kind of theater but also politically engaged I don't know why there aren't more pieces about the loss of democracy or about fascism about other kinds of topics now that are really strong and in the air. We don't seem to have a theater that deals much with utopia and these kinds of things so I would like to see some parts of our theater move in that way and I would definitely like to see a change in theater study away from an obsession with theory there's too much conformity today I feel and is there a loss of history? Well I was just thinking what Bonnie was saying I think one of the things you didn't say Bonnie was that the reason that what we studied which was the work of the past was because we were the work of the future. In other words study all those plays I mean not have to but then we would run to New York and see all the new stuff like it was out of our we were going to take everything that we knew and support the work that would change the theater it wasn't at all like we were going to imitate that but I think the thing you brought up should be underscored I mean if you look at Shakespeare's work in the 1590s the word succession was banned by law you could not utter that word because Elizabeth was too old to have children and there were no errors and it was forbidden to talk about he died in 1603 every single play he wrote no matter if it was a comedy a tragedy a history it was great people went and had a great time but it's reading in the middle of each of those plays all about what's going on in the world politically in London during that decade in other words it's a play that's operating the plays are operating on many different levels and you can go and watch on whatever level you want you can just go and have a good time or you can go and see it as a contemplation of succession and how people rule etc which was absolutely on everyone's minds because they were very aware of the political events of the day and I think it's that multi-layered approach of nuance that you're to some degree talking about the other thing that struck me when you were talking is that there's something nobody talks about but it's the most important thing which is the audience I mean reading your book and thinking back to some of the performances that you mentioned and I saw some of those as well okay maybe they were in a loft in some abandoned part of Soho in 1971 but it was impossible to get into them I mean they were mobbed and the reason I say that is because they found their audience and no one will give you a success in the theatre except an audience that you're speaking to in some way and as I said it could be the group theatre broke in the middle of the depression who somebody gave a house to upstate and they went up and they said okay Frank you write the play and you said well I've never written a play that was Clifford Odette's and you act in the play Ilya Kazan okay they made the play but they brought it into New York there were a thousand one hundred people there the first night who never even been to the theatre from the Lower East Side going strike so it's got to you can't do something and say bring me an audience with you you have to bring them along I mean I worked when I first came to Lincoln Centre with Bernard Gerstin now passed away who was the founder of the public theatre and founder of Zoetrope Studios and revived Lincoln Centre theatre he used to say there's an actual particle that is in the universe that I've named it's not an electron or a proton it's called a theatron and it's the particle that goes back and forth between the actors and the audience and the actors hit it like a tennis ball and then the audience hits it back harder and then the actors hit it back even harder and then when it's going you're really cooking and he used to say I always go to Curtin Down when I'm in the building just to see if those theatrons are moving and if they're not moving the theatre is dead and that has to be generated by the artists who make it it isn't an audience that like in school forced to come to your show it wants to come to your show it wants to be squeezed into that loft and rota and potato land just to be sure I don't know you were probably there like the lucky 60 people who got to see that I mean that's just how it's always worked I don't expect to do something and have people come by by being forced to come they have to really want to come and see that and that's a mysterious phenomenon how that theatron gets kicked into gear don't forget I was married to someone who was in rodin potato land it lasted for five months the Richard Forman play lasted five months that was the run he thought he was going to be in for a couple of weeks but it was such a big hit I wrote about it an entire page in the Soho weekly news imagine having a whole page in a newspaper writing about one show well that's something else I mean the Soho I used to write for them they did an article about literary managers that I was in that's something we really miss now it's part of our culture we have so little coverage of things the voice is gone, the Soho paper the New York press there is no real criticism the Times has become such a celebrity driven rag in terms of theatre there's no serious theatre there is some in that paper for visual arts but not for theatre at all it's a celebrity and money driven and I think for audiences especially young people who come to the city they're looking I'd never heard of Richard Forman until I came here and then I saw something or I saw all this thing and decided I would go try and get in so I don't know how theatres that are starting up find audiences because there's no people have to get on the right sources but it's not as I always thought one of the things I would do if I wasn't in the artistic side there's always a hit show somewhere when chorus line is at the public there would be hundreds of people who couldn't get into the Newman and I thought they should have kiosks that would say ok you didn't get in but here are 10 shows that you can get to within 10 minutes go over and buy a ticket at La Lama that you can spread the wealth around because there's so much to see how do you know what it is and how do you who's going to you have to go to a constant number of websites to find out what's going on and I refuse to do that I just don't even know what to go see and also because there's no discussion even people who make theater often don't really discuss it as are you never know why any one thing is more meaningful than another it's very hard in the current situation to to feel what's important to see or to know and why it doesn't seem particularly hard to do to create a kind of centralized site where things could be listed along with people who love them so that maybe you never heard of the artist but it's like Monty Moranca says go check this out they're really interesting so that you begin to get a network going isn't just the graduates of your school or your roommates or something that would be a valuable thing to do maybe we should talk Facebook into doing that maybe reputation our great team that desired our there's something simple that can be and it's true we don't more and more is done more and more is produced and less we know we eat more but perhaps it's less healthy we have more calls and contacts but we have less time as families there's something there that theater has to be part of a change and to help to create you both in a way what else of my international list globalist what do you feel about American theater is it has it opened up what I know that for both of you it was important to be outside the Americas but what do you think at the moment of American theater you know I was just going to say now that you mentioned that because the U.S. is notorious for it's poor history of translation and you can imagine that plays are at the bottom of the heap even though the record is so poor with novels I don't know if you remember but I can recall in the 70s going to Broadway and there'd be translation of German plays or something you know or play some other countries but you know you don't see that much translation our theater is really dominated by I'm talking about Broadway or some you know production of a play not an opera or more performance oriented thing there's very little chance most of it is done in the universities but the major European writers are not available to to most of our theaters or certainly not to Broadway anymore and we do get a lot of international work at the Armory or at Brooklyn Academy of Music for very high priced tickets but there is so much going on in Europe that we never see so many great works that I hear about or that I'm fortunate enough to see when I'm traveling to Europe there's a lot of serious serious work and a lot of our funding went along who was paying for what country and culture and what festival which country paid for something to come so I don't know if you've been on the inside as we have you're absolutely right the plays that we were able to see from other countries were paid for by those other countries who had arts funding we really did not and you're referring to a time on Broadway and you could also add in the many festivals that have gone out of business like we had a great festival at Lincoln Center where you could see all kinds of work that closed is that you would see you know Diana Rigg or something in a Greek play or you would see the first college had Strayler coming just all kinds of things it's something that is you know it's enormously expensive to do it's never paid for by Americans they're not really interested I mean they have to raise the money from the countries that send the work but I always found I mean I've actually done a number of initiatives to try and change that and I don't know whether it's just my own interest or whether the director's lab changed my view of it my focus hasn't been strictly on Europe it's been on very other you know very different parts of the globe I mean I always found it odd and it's just sort of a characteristic of America I mean if you look at the population of the United States how many people speak more than one language and the answer 50 years ago was nobody but when the NEA was founded you know and the theaters were built by the Foundation in 1967 the statistic was 2% of the United States citizenry had ever been in the theater because it's a nation of immigrants non-educated but now more people have a lot of COVID times have gone to go to the theater than go to football games I mean people really took to it and now we have so many immigrants I mean I would say 50% of the people in this country speak 2 languages they came from somewhere, they speak that language they came from they now speak English and yet we feel very a certain swath of the population really the people making decisions about publications and things like that don't and there's so much theater going on in Indonesia and India obviously Japan Africa and stuff I mean I see that because of the director's which is extremely international that my own attempts were to sort of you know it's like in Ibsen's Pier again this is one of my favorite metaphors when you can't get through you have to go around the boy says to him to Pier go around when he's lost I thought maybe the solution would be to find individuals from different cultures who would create theater together that was a sort of synthesis for something that they agreed on rather than bringing the bowl show yet which is worthwhile doing they're fantastic but it costs five million dollars that there might be a way of actually making work that is truly a collaboration between different countries and I made a whole plan how to do this a theater in Seattle could invite somebody from Iceland or something or from Kenya to come for a month in a rehearsal space provide some actors put them up at the house of a board member and then do a presentation for a couple of days and what would be done with this director and American actors would be and designers would be very interesting and you could jumpstart a lot of things like that relatively quickly and hasn't got much traction I started with a couple of other people a National Theater Translation Fund which included a whole subsection on translation from African countries and I could not get anyone to house it and it wasn't that big I mean it would be an obvious resource for people who don't know about that turned down couldn't do it we are performing arts there's not going to be any interest in that you know what can you do it's simply opening people's minds to things that they've never imagined like my god this is a play or this can look like this or this can be about this and there's so much interesting stuff that's happening and has happened that we don't know about and somebody needs to figure out and then we have equity regulations I've got many panels and you see Poland was the worst you see productions by young Polish theater directors they look like movies that cost 3 million dollars fabulous actors three cameras fabulous production finishing and Americans are for good reason aren't allowed to bring cameras into any rehearsal because equity doesn't allow it because you would have film of I don't know I'm picking a name Al Pacino and he was 20 doing Richard II and he wouldn't they don't want that you can't bring a camera in America into an equity rehearsal or a production without paying and we have shows that are shown on PBS but that's like a huge budget thing so it was very hard to get American directors into these places because they had no work to show not because of their own fault but because of union issues that were always surprising to people in Europe because of sort of hidden barriers to this international thing that haven't been figured out yet but take the European festivals I mean there are festivals in Asia as well and they have an enormous amount of really great high quality artworks and it's a shame we don't have any of that here in this country you have nothing like that in New York City and sometimes when things appear they're here for a couple of days which is amazing you just can't possibly see the work or they can't get an audience in one day or two appearances or something there's so many things that need to be changed like if I spread throughout the society and culture we're just so backward in many many ways we need such a revamp of structures and I don't know maybe your artists and people have to just protest more and not leave lobbying to professional lobbyists you know for arts advocacy and that kind of thing it's all left to lobbyists and institutions well I mean I've been I've lobbied I went to DC with a very savvy lobbyist a couple times and you know it's tough I mean I was sent to visit a senator with an extremely famous actor because our families were my mother's family were cattle ranchers and this actor was from a ranching background too and we were sent to the senator from Montana who had voted to disband the NEA and he had become a senator from Montana because he had run a campaign called Montana the last best place which was a title of a book of short stories written by Montana writers funded by the NEA he'd stolen the title for his campaign his campaign run and there's a lot of good writers in Montana and we said it was like have you no shame you know and now you're voting down the thing that gave you your he voted it down I mean it's really tough I mean you read the paper every day it's you know and then he had his picture taken with the famous actor on the way out yeah so I mean the lobbyists are there they get it it's not them it's I don't know there should be artists and people in this theater who maybe have to become more public about these things yeah like in Europe where cultural policy is also a matter of elections when was the last time you heard anyone discuss cultural policy in a debate yes it's non-existent even in New York politics you know another thing I think that could be helpful to theater to artists would be if the universities opened up their theaters to theater companies because often the universities around this country have the biggest and best plants and places always working downtown or in Brooklyn somewhere and they're all just empty much of the year why don't the universities open up to professional semi-professional theater people and have some integration of education and professionalism and use these theaters more and there are a few examples of that New York stage in film is on a takes place on a campus in the summer and Williamstown and I think Frank it was you maybe I'm wrong who had this amazing brilliant idea to take all the huge theater facilities here in New York City that were owned by the City University of New York and to make them available for theater for neighborhood theater another panel also on Friday we are thinking how can we help to create a city-wide festival in 2023 in the summer how we make parks neighborhoods parking lots but not also the CUNY theaters it is the largest system actually in the nation terribly underfunded need to be rented out to make a little bit of money but I think now and the time where popular theater also in a way has gone away it is the city university so we should also have theater for the city for the people for the workers with affordable prices and we'll see what we what we can do I mean again this is why it's so important to remember what's gone before because it tells you what's possible to do I was very close and a great admirer of Adrian Hall a director who came out of West Texas along with Barlin Wright and Robert Wilson at the same time who started a theater in Providence Rhode Island called Trinity Repertory Theater that was based on the Repertory and the organization of the theater was based on Mrs. Hallam's company an itinerant post Elizabethan actress who had picked up her company and gotten a sailing ship and came to the United States after the revolution like in Huckleberry Finn they come into town and they put on a show from the Repertory from her and started this theater in Rhode Island it's a small state he went immediately to meet the governor and talked the governor into funding every high school student in the state coming to the Trinity three times a year so every person who grew up during Adrian's tenure which was about 20 years in Rhode Island they were doing plays so they were used to going to the theater they knew how to go and he was doing all kinds of stuff classic work very cutting edge new work he was working with Eugene Lee who you know is the set designer for Saturday Night Live but a very avant-garde designer you can always see the stage nothing is hidden it's not illusionistic in any way and so he had students involved I mean one of the reasons we're in trouble is because we don't have any arts education in the schools kids don't know art they don't have art classes and that has a terrible effect I mean right after this is a strange thing to be saying on this right after Columbine for some reason just a coincidence I was invited to speak at the studio about something this is after the the avant-garde was dead a young very smart moderator and it was such a shocking time and he said the most amazing thing he said if they hadn't cut out arts education in Colorado they used to have a lot of arts education in Colorado because they taxed hotel rooms with something called the ZAP tax zoos arts and parks arts was kind of hidden in the middle but a lot of theaters were built and sustained by the ZAP tax they cut it out and he said if there had been arts education in high school in Colorado that kid would not have shot that school up because he would have seen a picture by Edvard Munch or he would have read a play by X and realized that's where I need to go not everyone is like people in my high school there's a world that's outside that is greater that I don't need to just feel like I'm about to kill myself so I'll go in and shoot some people but he had no idea all he was doing was playing video games and I thought that was really profound I mean I'm a great admirer of Dana Joya who was the NEA head for a while and he thought up he thought up so many ideas he thought up the idea of the great read which is an idea where every city chooses an author from that city and then everybody reads a book or two of that authors book clubs the schools read them the libraries display them so that it's sort of like across the city everyone's reading a book from Milwaukee or from Cheyenne it ties it to a place but it also moves through class hierarchies it's those kinds of national thinking it's a little bit like the Federal Theater project you pointed out how big the impact the Ford Foundation was on funding of American and also regional theater system but also New York as in Lincoln Center in a way if I'm right it was paid for the Federal Theater project do you think it had profound impact on American theater I think the Federal Theater project and there's also music projects or a person was involved in that there's a lot of stuff was very widespread and a lot of people were involved in it but in the same way that the NEA was brought down because of homosexuality and the objection to that shut down the NEA reduced its funding the Federal Theater project was closed because it was accused of being communist and the reason it was accused of being communist was that several a number of people who were involved in it as artists and as managers had what's the word were not anti-communists I don't know if they were communists but it's during the whole leading up to HUAC and so it was in both cases politics that brought it down and maybe that's because of the freedom of art which will go to all kinds of places and that's a threat it needs to be a chorus line it can't be Brecht's mother I mean something about that that seems it's never changed I think it's a great streak of that still in the country yeah yeah and in a way if we're thinking about this it's a streak that's coming from both sides now it's coming from I don't know that anybody's worried about the theater being communist or gay anymore but that same that same censorious streak is coming from the left now you know and again that's why it's such a great life the theater is so free it's not a coincidence Freud named everything after plays the Oedipus complex it's a dark place it's a place that can go to very deep places very controversial places it explores it tells a great story it shows you wonderful art but it goes into very strange places that does upset people it can upset people who want something a little more simple maybe that's the way it's always been and the way it will always be I don't know I hope that in our time artists there are artists who go against the grain and who just take that freedom and not censure themselves but just do the kind of work they really want to do yeah maybe coming slowly close we have some time to end but I would like to hear from you in your long career of working for the theater dramaturging editing what did you see, what do you feel like this was the most beautiful thing this was foundational I understood something pieces that worked for you what was it what do you remember as this is why theater performance is performance and the play is a play I wish you'd asked me that question yesterday so I could have thought about it a little bit I mean it's funny the first thing that came to my mind was the first time I saw Ariane Manuschking doing Iphigenia and Alice that just blew my mind I mean there were really many many many examples I started in a repertory company in San Francisco with Bill Ball at ACT and one of the resident directors was Ellis Rao and he did an amazing production of Merchant of Venice that really was about the Castro district in San Francisco but somehow both were on the same stage at the same time and I was fortunate to see productions by Giorgio Strahler in Italy and Peter Stein in Germany and I mean you know just help me out here the Medea that Fiona Shaw did Deborah Warner's show at BAM that was incredible I mean there are so many that it's kind of hard to pick one that really I would highlight I feel the same way there's so many great works I would say you mentioned Strahler, I would say the Tempest which was at the best one of the great productions I've ever seen. I'm also very moved by singers I love singers and concerts in more recent times I think the work of Teresa de Kiersmacher is really sublime and beautiful use of dance and music but there's so many things you're struck in different ways by as a young critic and students seeing different kinds of work you know for the first time like Meredith Monk or Trisha Brown or Lee Brewer's Beckett was some of the best Beckett I've ever seen in my life has come and go which was done with mirrors in a tiny little theater when Theater for the New City was over by the West Side Highway was also one of the great productions different productions have different meanings I mean by this time so many of the great world directors in the post-war period and I've seen them largely in Europe Ayan Mishkeen also is a favorite of mine and I the last work she not the last work but one of the work she brought to New York was a stunning work and I actually write about it in my book I'm struck by work that has a real strain of emotion or beauty I love virtuosity I have to say even if it's a kind of anti-virtuosity that knows what it's doing like say Yvonne Reiner you know in her famous notes spectacle but I love performers and I've watched performers and performance since childhood having been able to see on television the Boardville and the burlesque and comics and all those things I love any kind of performance and I love old movies and now I'm even more interested in Kari Grant movies from the 50s knowing he was on acid on them I recently watched A Favorite of Mine with Ingrid Bergman I don't know if he shot films on acid but I know he took acid all I know is he's one of the most gorgeous men who ever lived one of my favorites is this film in which Ingrid Bergman plays an actress and he's a diplomat and they're lovers in middle age it's called Indiscreet and it's just so witty and it's so actressy with her in it you know the way she plays an actress but I you know I guess I like actors more and more in terms of watching them but I guess I was always mostly attracted to a director's theater and one of the great performances I recently saw was the British visual artist and theater man William Kentridge not British I meant South African William Kentridge he did a piece at the Armory a few years ago which was just an extraordinary piece and he had to invent new kinds of projections I don't think a lot of theater people saw it because I don't think a lot of theater people you know necessarily go to dance and visual arts and museums or read novels it's not really apparent in the criticism or in the writing or in their work but the Armory has had very extraordinary things the Heinrich Goebbels directed the Dutch opera I think a few years ago with all the sheep in it you know we had to hear the Berlin Philharmonic that was a treat I have more mixed feelings about it but you know it's funny you're saying I went to William Kentridge's house we had done a ton of South African work before Mandela was released we did Zephine as you know we did multiple festivals in place and I went to his house when I had ever heard of him and I had very small children I had left behind with my husband and we were talking about our kids and he gave me a toy that he had made for his child who was the same age as my child a little alligator carved out of wood painted with a coat hanger that you would push it and its tail would wag and I took it home in my suitcase aren't you lucky William Kentridge he was completely he wasn't broke but he was a working artist hustling to make a living in Joberg back then even being a visual artist his interest in theatre his work was handspring company I think handspring guys were so amazing there is something that is meaningful for you who are experts but also for the general public in Germany we had the great 3 penny opera the people loved but also the critics we had the great 3 penny opera that Richard Forman directed that Raoul Julia started I saw it I used to go to a lot of great musicals around the 70's also I mean I saw the original company Follies I saw a lot of stuff there I saw Mame and Hello Dolly and Chanel and Coco and applause I would go to everything I just love performance and as I said I really admire virtuosity I go to the opera when I can and even though the staging appeared to European opera and you know dance as I mentioned there is so much to see but I do regret not having one forum in which you can kind of figure out what to go and see without getting thousands of press releases in the email or having to go to so many multiple sites I lost interest in doing that who has the time for that and also I had a talk with Gregory Mosher who will join us for the CUNY talks he's now at Hunter College who said he did one of the family plays now but I'm also proud of that I was able to make tickets for $25 or $27 there is something we have to be aware that was our motto was on our stationery good plays, popular prices and I think we still have something the tickets were $46 and I'm sorry we have 46,000 members the tickets were $35 it was cheap and people liked the shows there were musicals there was folding gray there was Seraphina there was it was a really a range of material that he and Bernie did we had an enormous and very diverse audience because the shows were good and people didn't have to pay a lot I think this is something we really also have to work and also for us at City University what can a theater really do for the city for the workers, for people that's affordable, that kids can go families go and enjoy life the access to arts, the access to healthcare the access to education there are fundamental human rights and I think now especially in the time we live which can become dangerous again I think we have to take a stand we have to go out and we have to take some action in it means also bringing art and in a way not just culture but also art is that you sit or stand or whatever you're doing and your brain goes into what you're hearing or what you're watching so in a way it has to be a kind of a culture related experience so when you take kids it's important that they bend to a theater before I mean we have a big education program it's very well run but learning how to enter a theater and not talk back to the stage and again that's Adrian Hall's genius if you've seen, if you've been there 12 times you know A it's going to be very entertaining or you're going to be restless but B you learn how to do it and then when you're able to absorb it it makes you very happy because you absorb such greatness and you send those theaters back to the stage but the first time for a lot of people it's kind of like wow that's true the great German there was a comedian at the time Obrech Karl Valentin he seriously wrote also the mayor of Munich said every person in Munich should be forced by law to go once a month to the theater and the mayor wrote back this is outrageous how could you do that and he answered back well people wouldn't be forced to go to school who would go to school what kids would go in and he had a point where he had one two but really thank you which could go on much longer we will have also a talk specifically about the book because that deal tells the significant insights which we have to go into but I thought it was so valuable to hear from you in your thoughts thanks very much for doing it Frank and I also enjoyed being so much with you and Anne and Bonnie both of you together and also please accept our thankfulness and gratefulness for the tremendous contribution both of you have made Bonnie almost 50 years with her journal of performance and art, surveying a landscape, writing about it creating an archive that also having a network of friends and artists keeping it alive and pointing to it and her work as a dramaturg in great productions but also the great great director's lab journal which you put out the magazine we had also evenings about it it's a great model it's shining both of what you do there are diamonds and I hope also for all our emerging artists something to look up to that two women put up created something that is something to look up follow and perhaps also change it was the great Carl Jung who said we have to reinvent the symbols and things have to more energy has to chime through the concert next Sunday it wouldn't have the energy it had but for the time that was right but what is now right for this time we have to find that each generation has to do it but there is help to get on the mountain and I think both of you are excellent guides so thank you both and thanks for all around again for hosting us it's a tremendous honor to be nationwide streamed with this discussion I know we have for so many international things from the legal team Andy Tanvi and our team in Mumbai so thank you all and I hope you will tune in tonight for the 7 o'clock performance I think it will be a very interesting one and to check out the program and the discussions and perhaps also it's going to be a small discussion about how to start a theater festival an international global one that's different that is in all neighborhoods that includes hopefully all the people is it possible or not or does New York even need it so we are going to talk about this on Friday but I'm happy you brought it up without me prompting you goodbye thank you