 Hello. Oh my gosh. Hi. Welcome to our talk back of existentialism. I'm Begzi. I am from Turkey. Mia, you told me to mention that. And this talk back is also being live streamed and my parents at 4.30 a.m. are watching this right now. Thank you. Well, let me introduce you all. I'll start with you. That's why I'm giving it to you. Anne Bogart, the director of the show. She's a theater and opera director and former co-artistic director of City Company, which was founded with Tadashi Suzuki and won her first OB working with Talking Band on No Place, No Poetry in 1988. And she's also a professor at Columbia University, which is where I know her from. And Anna right here is the set designer as well as the projection designer. Yeah. And she's also a visual artist and a video designer. She's worked with Talking Band on The Golden Toad, Marcellus Chail, Flipside, and Burnished by Grief, which was held at La Mama's The Club. And Gabriel Berry is the costume designer. And she works in theater, opera, and dance. And she specializes in new work and has designed premieres of works of artists, including, but not limited to, Samuel Beckett, Charles Lodlam, Maria Irene Fornez, Mobile Minds, Philip Glass, Harold Pinter, Ellen Stewart. Yeah. Yeah. Well, et cetera. Et cetera. Indeed. Okay. So to start us off, I actually had this later on in my questions, but I feel like this is the appropriate time to mention that. After the opening of the show, I was just observing everyone that was coming out of the show. And they had this like dazed look in their eyes. And I'm getting emotional. I just stopped crying after the show. They had this dazed look in their eyes. And I asked, like, how do you feel? How was it going? How did you like the show? And they went silent. Every single person that I've asked, they went silent. And they smiled. And they went and then said, I have a lot to think about with a smile on their faces, which is, I feel like at this time of life and world or all of time, thinking is not easy to do. And it's really nice to see people being excited to think about. So I want to start with asking, how did you all manage that? How does one think about thinking, put it on a show, and then make it endearing to the point that people are taking it to be something that they want to do? Of course. I can say it as many times as they like. How do you make people think about thinking and then get them excited about it? Okay, I got it. First of all, thank you, Bexy. It's great to be sitting next to you. And thank you for being present in the audience tonight and being here afterwards. Here comes water delivery. Thank you. So you used an interesting, no, I don't like that word interesting, you used a provocative word, which is, how do you make people think? Oh, hello. Go ahead and say it and then I'll do it. All the next extraordinary, yeah. And Ellen Maddow, extraordinary Ellen Maddow. So, Bexy just asked the hardest question of all, which is how do you make one more time? Of course. How do you make people think about thinking and get them excited about it? Because she said that outside, after opening night, people were smiling and not smiling and saying they had a lot to think about. So I just want to start responding to that. And I can see Paul's ready to say something, is that I don't think you can make people think. I think you create the conditions for thought. So it's like creating a garden. So you don't go in thinking, I want to make everybody think. You create a garden in which there's space that we can think together. Paul. Well, I think first of all, the text is worth thinking about. It's something that deserves thinking about. And I feel my job is to really understand it as well as I can. And try to really, as I'm doing it, to really be thinking what it's about. That it's not something that's wrote. And in that way, as I'm thinking about it, I'm trying to give a space for people to be thinking about it with me. Who thought it up? I mean, who was the first person that said, we need to do a play about this? Well, I beg to see. Oh, and I also meant to say hello to everybody who's watching from Turkey. Oh, hi. Thank you. It's just my parents probably. Paul and Ellen came to me in the context of a restaurant in my neighborhood, and they said, we'd like to condition you. We'd like to commission you to do something with Talking Band. And I pretty much right away said, and I hadn't thought of it before at all. I said, I pointed at Paul and I said, John Paul Sartre, and I pointed at Ellen and said, Simone de Beauvoir. And everything tumbled out after that commitment, because you make a commitment to something like that. That's a huge thing to say, right? And it was clear we didn't want to make a bioplay about them, not about their lives necessarily, but to be inspired by their example in our, and it started with the three of us. The three of us are, shall I say, getting older? Is that okay? Did I say that? So things that are on our mind then would be the fact that Jean Paul Sartre died well before Simone de Beauvoir, and she did have to keep going. And that question, I'm sure, comes to a lot of our minds in our lives. Like, how do we go on when we lose people? Anyway, I've gone far away from them. That was how it started. I mean, she also had this idea she had been, you had been to a loft, right? You want to tell the, here, she'll tell the story. I'll get it wrong. A story that was told to me in 1979 by the choreographer, Mary Overley, who told me when she first moved to New York, she moved into a loft building on Canal Street. Maybe somebody in here lived in that building too. It was a, it was a, and that was in 1972, I think. She told me the story in 79, and I, they were squatted, it was a squatted building. So there were many floors of squatted people living, squatting, squatting on their big, huge loft, and she knew that below her lived a brother and sister. And she told me in 1979, she said, she said, one day she needed some sugar, although she would never eat sugar, so it was probably salt. No, she wouldn't eat salt either. I don't know, milk? No, she didn't eat milk. Soy. Soy, she would eat some, I'm making this up, but this is true story. She needed something, and so she decided to go to the loft below where the brother and sister lived, who she didn't know. She went downstairs, pushed the door open, and it was a big, huge black sooty loft, and in the middle of this huge black sooty loft were two little white houses with white picket fences around them, and the brother and the sister lived in these two little houses. That story never left my imagination, and it suddenly thought, well, you know, Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir never lived together. They lived apparel their lives, but they met every day in a café, various cafés, to write together, and so it seemed like that was a great idea for a set, but really the person who made it happen is Anne. How did you make that happen? Oh my goodness. I think, yeah, I think Anne's first opening sentence is the most important. She really made the right conditions for us to flourish, and it was like working in a beautiful garden. So that was my very first meeting with Anne, where she told me this absolutely beautiful story, or more like an image, but I was never shown this image. I don't know how it actually looked like. It was just this sentence, two houses in a huge loft, and of course, how do you create a set designed for a philosophy, right? What's a philosophical set? So we have to actually make it happen, make it real, and I started looking for images that reminded, like that floated in front of my eyes when I heard this sentence. This beautiful image, in fact, and suddenly I had this image where there were two houses on the water, almost like a dock, and that reminded Anne of the Roschenberg studio, and so it was... Coptiva Island. Yes, Coptiva Island, and so we were back and forth. It was a dialogue, in fact, so we started the dialogue, and then from there on, I feel like we sculpted this set together, but also the birds sculpted this set just as well, and then, of course, the, you know, the passages or the roads, the Japanese Kabuki tradition, and everything somehow fell in place. You know, this is how much of everything we needed, and this was the maximum, this was the minimum, so this is our sculpture. This is what happened, and we decided everything is on a void or in a void on the edge of the world, so here we are. Well, let me introduce Talking Band before we continue with my questions, but Masters, and mine, and many others' opinion of showcasing human connection and the fun sides of it with music. Talking Band is celebrating their 50 years, and they've been combining techniques, music, language, movements, genres, and innovating in New York for all these years, and the way you do it feels like it's like colors that are meant to be mixed. It's just you create such a painting that becomes a show. They've influenced many generations of artists and keep doing so as well, of course, and Paul Zemite and Ellen Mado are founding members of Talking Band. They've most recently performed in the 600 Highwaymen and Talking Band production of the following evening at the Pearlmen Performing Arts Center, and Talking Band is also a resident company at La Mama. Yeah. And just also, we're doing a third production too, which was going to be at the Mabu Mines Theater in May, and it's called Shimmer and Herringbone, and Ellen and I wrote it, and it's quite, well each show has been quite different, but this one's going to be very different because it's got a big cast and it's got a string trio, a live string trio, which Ellen wrote the music for, so come see that for something different and the same. I just wanted to say one thing about, because of music, but the other big thing about this big idea was these typewriters, these manual typewriters, which you know, the sound designer Darren knew a place in Chelsea that just sells old typewriters that are refurbished, and at first we thought we could get one, you know, we could get them on eBay or something, but they had to be really in good shape, so we found, you know, we went there and this guy showed us these ones, they're from the 60s, I think, and they're in really great shape, and then we used them, you know, they were very inspiring as far as rhythms and the kind of interaction between two people who are writers, because I think that De Beauvoir and Sarge spent a lot of time sitting side by side writing in their lives, so anyway, I just wanted to mention that musical idea, which was a big part of the thing too. Yeah, and I just want to say something about collaboration, which of course, you know, is all vital to all kinds of theater, but I feel, we worked with Anne Gabriel back in 88, Anne got her first obi, I think on that one, it was a show called No Place, No Poetry, which was based on the theoretical writings of Bert Elbrecht, none of his plays, none of his poetry, just the theoretical writings, and it was a wonderful collaborative experience, and one of the things about what I love working with Anne is that she's so open to the ideas from her collaborators and really looks for inspiration from them, so you really feel like, you know, you're making it together, which often happens, but not to this degree, so that was one of the things that really wanted, made us want to work with Anne again, and with Gabriel, who has a way of giving you a costume that, number one, makes you look good, and number two, sort of just gives you this sense of a character that you're playing and some kind of genius going on there, and then Anne brought in two of her really brilliant collaborators, Darren West, who did the sound design, and Brian Scott, who did this incredible lighting, and we brought in Anna, who's done many sets for us, and it's not one person that makes us peace, you know, it's just like everybody was sort of like tuning into this text, these ideas, and, you know, making this thing as a whole. A little bit more on the collaboration. The way the play moves, the show really moves, because the topic of existentialism, when you, when you, when you're just mentioning it, feels very cold, very hard, very not safe, and you think a lot about time, and the way this felt is more like it was a metronome, rather than a watch with a heart. Like, your color blocking, the shapes are pretty sharp, if you think about it, and then the way the scarves sit on them, the different way the scarves sit on them, it's just all of the detail, it's so detail-oriented, but at the same time, minimalistic, what I'm trying to get at and ask is how do you deal with your workplace relationship with time? Well, I wondered how long Ellen and Paul could sit facing the audience eating apples and do nothing but that. That was the basic question I had in the beginning. It turns out you hardly ate your apple at all tonight, because I know the other night Paul choked on the apple and couldn't speak. So you were like, but so it doesn't turn out to be such a long time they eat the apples, but that was the basic question. How long will the audience allow them to eat their apples? And that's the metronome you're talking about. What can I say? Yeah, I mean Ann kept saying make everything longer, really take your time. She kept wanting us to add minutes to the show. We never quite made it as long as she wanted it to be. Yeah, I think time is one of the big themes, but another theme is about our time specifically, and I notice the more as we dug into de Beauvoir and Sartre's work, the parts of it that really resonated with me was they developed the theories of existentialism a lot during the Second World War when things were, they were in France and things were very desperate, and the question of just, you know, with the conditions of your time and find meaning still within that, those conditions. So there are a lot of lines which I'm sure resonate with some of you, you know, there may be more beautiful times than this, but times with this one is ours. I may not always know what, I cannot always choose what happens to me, but I can choose what to make of it. You know, freedom is what you do with what's been done to you. All those things are kind of essential to their experience and how they found kind of freedom within the very desperate situation, and to me that's a really valuable question now, you know, just, you know, when things look bleak, how you really find, you know, what has meaning, and where can you find the freedom within the contingency of the circumstances? It's just like it seems an important question to consider. One more thing that might be interesting in terms of time is that we decided to rehearse it rather than, you know, in that usual three-week slot where you get a lot of pressure and then you have to get the show up. I said, you know, during the fall, I teach on Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesdays, so let's meet every Thursday, Friday, Saturday, Sunday, and work on the play together. And also very unusually, it was really just Paul and Ellen and Patrick up there, stage manager, young Patrick, who actually, thank God, knows how to use QLab and could take notes really fast. And so it was really fun to go to rehearsal because I live in the Upper West Side and I would take the subway, know the B train, or the C train down to Spring Street and get out. And Paul and Ellen have lived in Soho since 1971. They bought their loft for $6,000. I don't know. Big loft on Mercer Street. And, you know, it was different back then. But I get off the subway Spring Street and walk along Spring Street towards Mercer. And it's like Cartier, Balangia, like every, it's a huge, you know, it's a shopping market for rich people. And then I turn onto Mercer and then walk into their building, get on the elevator, take it to the sixth floor, and walk into their very different world, which still has a little of 1973 in it. And time changed. And we would sit at their kitchen table and then we'd get up at work and talk. It was a different time. So we did that all during the fall. And it didn't feel like a pressurized situation. So I guess it's true that the rehearsal circumstance, I know Ellen Lorne and I did that with Room, the Virginia Woolf piece, similarly in a barn. And it makes for a whole different experience of a play. It's not, it's just, we're around a little kitchen table and walking out into the rehearsal space. And there's something about time in that as well. Banksy. Thank you. Did you want to have some? About time. About time. So time is very different for the set. But I think time, I mean, it's activation basically, how Anne or how Paul or Ellen activate the space in duration or during the performance. So it only exists as much as they use it or how they use it. And I was thinking they really, really, I mean, I was very happy that the set really existed because it was lived in, it was used to the maximum. And I discovered things that I never knew that existed in this space. And how I activated this space. I mean, I had a talk with Brian. Brian's called the lighting designer and he said he doesn't like to come back to last performances because he sees what he could have done and how we force actors into just one thing. But they evolve in this space, just how we evolve in, you know, in our apartments or our spaces. But for me, it's a little different. I mean, the architecture has to be there and it can't change a lot. I can change it with props. I can change it with, I can see how it changes with the movements of the actors. But I can also change it or activate it with the projections. And it was really interesting for me to discover how time works or how vertical and how horizontal time works in this, or how horizontal and verticals work in this space. I love geometry, you could tell. But yeah, so this was my time in the set. Thank you. Well, I will get to my question that is what has changed in decades of being in this industry. But before I do that, my question is what hasn't changed for you in performance, tactic throughout all these years? What hasn't changed for you? Well, I'll start with what has changed. Because it's elemental about this. I was talking back in Ellen again, like when we were making theater, when we were younger, you can dispute this. It was kind of, fuck the audience. I don't give a shit what they think. You never thought. I thought I thought I did. You were somebody to me that always treasured, you always thought the audience should have a good time. Good time. Yes, that's one seventh of theater. I thought that. But the rest of it. All right, one seventh. But really, just like push it out. And then that's changed. I think that the relationship now between the audience and the stage is sacred more so than since COVID, since the changes were going through. And that one could say it was always sacred, but I didn't realize it. I'm not sure what the two of you think. But I've mentioned this often, a quote from Alfred Brendel, the famous pianist who's known for playing Beethoven sonatas. And he said in an interview once that in concert he will get to just before the final chord of a Beethoven sonata. And he lifts his hands and asks the audience silently how long they'll allow him to wait until he plays the final chord. And when I read that, I just thought that's it. That's everything. And for me, that's what the theater's become. But maybe it's never changed. It's always been about that circular relationship. But that's what I'm curious about. Were you fuck the audience back in? I mean, they go back to the open theater and Joe Chacon. So, hey. Okay, well, do you want to? No, you go ahead. Go ahead. Well, I'm going back to the 60s when we were working with Joe Chacon in the open theater. You know, there was this kind of spirit of change and a sense of that there was a kind of a revolution going on and a cultural one and political one. And we thought we were part of that. We felt very much a part of that. And so we felt the theater, it was a reaction to a kind of what we felt was a kind of a deadening thing that happened in the 50s, both culturally and politically, where there was a certain way you were supposed to act, a certain way you were supposed to behave. And Joe was really interested in these other sides of human behavior and nature that weren't expressed. So you had to find a new language to create that. You had to find a new physicality, a new way of using your voice, a new way of relation to music. So we felt we were right in the center of some great change. And and I think that was a very particular moment in time. As we went, I think through the 70s and 80s, you know, we became more just focused on what we could do in theater, how we could make make it interesting, how we could make it fresh. And that's still that's still the question that keeps going with us, which is why, you know, we asked like the 600 high women, which is a younger company, they're a couple of 40 years old, who are making really, really interesting work we'd seen and say, please make a piece with us. Do whatever you want. And they did. And, you know, because we feel like it's necessary to keep challenging ourselves like that, to keep throwing ourselves off balance. That's why we wanted to work with Anne. And but I think the thing you just said about post COVID, I think that's interesting because I feel like the first piece we did after COVID, it was right at the right when we were sort of coming out of the lockdown was lemon girls or art for the artless, which we did here at La Mama. And it was such a kind of joyousness about this audience coming together again which was kind of unexpected and wonderful. And we're feeling that again. You know, we're feeling that again with audiences. We feel that the last piece and this piece, I think, you know, it is a need which people are responding to and it's sort of feel like we're in the center again. I was very new to New York and La Mama when I actually heard about lemon girls or art for the artless and everyone was raving about it. And I heard about how joyful it was, how wonderful it was, even though it was a much different way of showing existentialism. And I just want to ask, what does it mean to bring existentialism, both the show and the ideology on stage today and exploring it and with Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir, bless you, in mind. I think I said what I had to say about that, why, you know, why it was important to me. So if the theater were a verb, I would say it would be to remember, to remember, to put things back together again. And our job is to remember what's on the verge of being forgotten. And that includes people who had things to say. And our job is to give voice to people who hadn't finished their sentences. And to give voice to these two individuals is a huge honor and is our job. Our job is to remember and to resurrect the shoulders upon which we stand. And so this is an example of that. That's really wonderful. It's a lot to take. Yeah, absolutely. I have my questions, but I'm happy to open it to the audience if you'd like to do that. Okay. All right, let's do that then. Let's open it up to the audience. If anyone has any questions, I'm going to let you choose who wants to. Me? Okay. All right. You and, yes, go ahead. As you should be. You're the director. Of course I do. Yeah, there's a lot of contradiction in the text that we use. And then the characters. This moment is the perfect teacher. And then the world. And then this, this. Yeah. That's my house. That's my house. I appreciate this dance. Yeah. Yeah. I wonder whether the actors decide on the spot a little bit every time, or whether they do it all night. Or are they just created? I think it's a combination of those two. I think it's very, very structured. We have a score that's very fixed, but then within that, there's a more and more as the more we perform it, the more I see how much space there is and how much freedom I have to kind of go this way or that way with it. Also, we worked with music from right at the beginning, and so there's this tempo that's set by the music that's sort of buoying you up in a way and providing the kind of bed onto which you put yourself. So that, yeah, there's a lot that comes from that. I had one other thing to say, and I forgot what it was. There also is times we're counting. That was the thing about the windows. Yeah, so when we were rehearsing, we just had these squares on the floor, and then we got these cardboard houses, and they had windows facing each other, and we did everything, a lot of things in unison, and then right as soon as we got those fake ones with the windows and said there can be no windows because it ruins what the play is about. So then suddenly we were in a situation where we couldn't see each other, and we had to do these things in unison, so some of those are terrifying, but usually we have ways of doing it, and then we realized we could go off from those ways that everything didn't have to be completely in sync, and that was interesting too as music is counterpoint and all that came into it. When we're talking about rhythm, and we've got so much of it, Darren West is the most phenomenal collaborator. He's the sound designer, he's the composer, though Ellen is also a composer of amazing, just life affirmation thing, but whenever Darren's in the room, and he's in the room for the damn first day on, I can't get away from him, he is continuously shifting to adapt to what's evolving, and then the actors themselves are shifting to adapt to what is evolving, and then Brian, the lighting designer, comes in, and sometimes I think that man is so anal, but it's because he absorbs all the nuances of the things that they've been put down, and that's Anne's squad, and I wouldn't want to be in a theater where they weren't admired and revered and hired all the time. Rhythmic, they're rhythmic, they got to do it. Seven costumes, I guess specifically, so there's this tipping point to my eyes where when Ellen first physically has this hall where stuff starts to literally get from a set and props and costumes, I'm just curious about what the discussion was about, like structure or restraints, maybe, and how that works with your process. I love that structure and restraint. What, like, there's that moment where like, I, to quote Katie Lag, I would. She said, she called, what she learned from Roy Orbison was physical containment and emotional expansion. So restraint is, I think, is what civilization is. We should think about that right now. Civilization is restraint. So I don't think there's much discussion about it, but there's a great deal of restraint. I don't know, Paul, what do you think? The one who presses the flesh first, and do you feel the power of that moment, the way we feel it? Probably not. Somebody who came to see the show the other day said that she didn't know if they knew each other in the beginning and only slowly learned who they were to each other, and I thought that was not intentional, and I thought it was interesting, because you don't actually know what their relationship is, it's revealed bit by bit, kind of sort of. There's a thing about pattern, you know, like everyday patterns, where you repeat the same thing over and over again over time, and something about the way a relationship endures through this kind of everyday, you know, things that repeat. So there is, you know, it goes through the seasons, and it also, you know, we're always returning to the type, we're always watering plants, always going shopping, so much that at first it was very confusing to remember which time did you go shopping, which time did you set the table, and you know, so it's very, I love that kind of repetition that shifts, you know, and that shows a lot about relationship. I'm hardly sure how I want to ask this question, but a number of the lines from this play, I feel like I've heard them or thought about them for a long time, and they resonated with me deeply, and at the same time they passed by with these huge ideas, philosophical ideas, and they moved so quickly because it's theater, and I think about these kind of philosophical shoots, and then these like images, and they became not ideas that sound, but that hits a table, it's a table, and it became just sound. You made these ideas editable, I feel like I could taste them, and they were experiential, not philosophical, and that really moved me. I wonder about, I only saw it tonight, but you've been performing it and refining it and thinking about it for a long time, and I wonder what is resonating or staying with you, or what questions have you discovered from being with this text so many nights for so long, what is kind of staying with you, is there a thing that I will have in my mind as these images, and ideas, I wonder what happens for you? That's hard to say, I think... I just think as we do it, and I try to really think about what I'm saying, that each line gets richer in some way, that I begin to understand it a little bit more. The other thing I find which is in performing it, is to let the words speak for themselves. I feel like whenever I start to kind of push it or kind of proselytize, that's not it. Just to sort of let the words be out there, let them have space, and that's tricky. Because you sort of want to sometimes, you know, actors want to sort of lay into things, and that restraint is like really important here, just to let the words hang there and listen to them. I'm using and creating kind of shepherds, and some kind of cans, and I think almost exactly where you're to go, some kind of shepherds at theater for the new city, and creating this kind of piece, can we talk about what was the process? Yeah, I can start on that, I'm sure Anne can pick up on that, too. We did a lot of reading, we just read a lot of, not only Sartre de Beauvoir, Merleau-Ponty, we read Husserl as we could. Other philosophers, we read Sarah Bakel's book The Existentialist Cafe, which is a wonderful book on existentialism, which I recommend other writers. And so we each did that kind of independently, and then we just, you know, underlying things and bringing them in, and Anne would start to compile them, and sort of give them form, and she had a real sense of kind of structure about, like some things were more kind of lectures to the audience, some things were dialogues between us, where they belonged, and they were usually really long, and I'm pretty good at editing, so I would then take a lot of them and edit a lot, and so it would go back and forth. Well actually, Gabriel, when you first came to our rehearsal, you were just putting it together, and I asked you, I said, is there too much space in there? I was worried about the apple eating, because they were eating them for a long time, and Gabriel said, no, I actually need the time in between the text to take it in. That was really helpful to hear, but also back to your question before, is that each piece of text that we ended up choosing does resonate, and it had to be the kind that I could listen to every night and hear differently. I very much wanted that to be that kind of text, and not just a whole bunch of text, but the space between it is as important sometimes as the text itself, but it had to have a certain richness and complexity, I think, so that was back to your question too. Periods, in between periods, but sometimes we're a little bit quote unquote long, it's not really long. So all the things, many of the things that everybody's been talking about, you've been talking about tonight, for me, it was a very refreshing evening theater. I sometimes find commercial theater exhausting, as if I'm being forced to take something in, and I really want to thank you for giving us the time and the space, and you did it through all the different mediums, and for me, as a musician, I wouldn't use the word metronome, but I'm probably meaning the same thing that those of you who use that word mean. It's just for a musician, the metronome is the opposite of, I know your friends with Lauren Flanagan, she talks about the great moments when you have a conductor that actually allows some libato, so she has some freedom while she's on stage, and so what that kind of created for me was, even with the set, with the lights, with the medium, a kind of a sense of an eternal present instead of a plot that I need to follow and it's trying to get through it as fast as possible because God forbid I get bored or something. That's such a beautiful thing you said, and somebody else said when they saw the play the other night, they felt present all the time, and I think also what you're talking about is freedom. A metronome is there in order to give you the chance to find freedom from it, that it's in a sense a sort of fascistic thing, and how do you move between it, which is what I'm talking about, about moving around the structures. The structure is quite set, but then how do you find freedom inside of it, and that search for freedom is actually what's happening in the room. It's not being received in the prefrontal cortex of the brain more you're looking at the story, but underneath you're seeing two people who are looking for freedom together and with us in the room, and it's kind of cool because this talk bike might be longer than the play. Yeah, but I saw the show twice, I saw it as partly expanded to a flat, but I don't think it's sort of a beautiful show, but it's a beautiful show. On top of this flat, and on top of the real thing, it's so long, so I've had to wait and it's so long, and I think it's going to be better, I've seen it in the play today, and we did something with the bike, I think it would be better tonight, and it changed all the things. If you couldn't hear how I was saying this, she's seen the play twice, could you hear? She's seen the play twice, and it's two different plays, but it's different shows. Is that the same thing? On top of the fact that there is a cultural activity, it's what you really need to be the one to start, and then actually leave. In the first time, I think like 20 minutes, I can work the robot on, but it's a little different, I wonder what it's like to be cool, and knowing things will be okay for you, but then it's changed, but it was something different, it was very interesting, and I think it was interesting. But it also has to do with the body. Yeah. Mehal, you have to come for a third time now. Which is... Me, because also because of the talk, we always see people talking about them, but it's also you. So I thought it was a different approach and we're talking today for a... A two-day song. Yes. Standing on shoulder, this play feels like something that is both performing and doing, and so my question is, as someone who is just swimming her feet into here, what is something for... You can't stay within you without living in and through marriage. Did you hear back... It's a hard one to translate. Megzy? I'll try my best. Is that you? Oh, God. There's a lot of pressure now. My question is, as someone who is just swinging their feet into theater, I'm 18, and this feels like it's both before me and under me. And if there's anything that you feel you like to share about living a life in theater, which is so hard to do, but also the best thing to do, especially my eyes, is there anything... You just answered your own question. Did I? But I don't think I know it the way that you might. But you have to live with that, right? It's a very difficult profession. It's the worst and the best. How do you live within that contradiction? There is no answer, is there? I don't know. I don't think so. I'm going to death. The size of the obstacle that you face determines who you become. If you had everything easy, you wouldn't become very much of a person or an artist. Don't wait for somebody to invite you to do something. Everybody here that I know is... I like good existentialists to determine their own fate by taking what the blows they were being dealt in responding. I... I bemoaned the prevalence of theater education and graduate programs and stuff because I rarely want to interact with people that come from theater schools because they have ideas about what should happen. When directors think that they have to tell you what to do, it's because they've been taught that. Don't wait for anybody to tell you what to do. Don't wait for enough money to go on a trip. Just don't wait. It's just lost time if you're waiting for the right moment. Now I have Paul's line just repeating in my head that's like, you're responsible for who you are. Should we wrap up? Alright, let's wrap up. Frank, these two people are so professional. They are extraordinary. And I keep saying, like, take a day off. They're like, oh, no. There was one day when it snowed. I said, let's not have rehearsal. Oh, we're going in. We're going in. We're going in. We're going in. We're going in. Oh, we're going in. I didn't go in. They went in. They went into Great Jones. It's really these two extraordinary... Thank you all so much for being a part of this and honored to have been a part of this.