 Thank you, thank you. Well good evening everyone. I'm very pleased to be here at the library with Kerry and in the Coret auditorium. This is a wonderful spot and I'm also pleased that we're talking about One City, One Book, a program I've always loved. I love unifying the city around a single work of literature and it's something as we're all reading it that we can all talk about and relate to and it's very San Francisco. So Kerry, first of all, thank you so much for having me and I'm happy to be on the stage with you. Well, thank you, Susan. I said I never even thought anyone would read this book and so I just wrote it for myself so it's amazing to me to have this happen. Yes, they say a book is even more revealing than being on stage in that you really are giving a lot of yourself and your life and your family. There's a lot going on when you write a book, yeah. I guess so, you know, it's so funny that life is very odd. You don't think of the things that are most vulnerable as being those things, you know, this I truly wrote sort of for myself and because it was really cathartic to write about my disasters and my first year and what I'd learned after 20 years, it was really cathartic and I wasn't thinking, oh my God. What would my mother think? Well, because I, initially the book, I don't know, maybe we'll talk about this, but initially the book wasn't personal at all and the great gift is that I landed at City Lights Press. I don't know if Elaine is here or Stacy, but there they are. So the fabulous Elaine Katzenberger was my amazing editor and that was the gift because Elaine really guided the book as a good editor does, I guess, but I was, I'm the only person in my family who has never written a book, so I was really behind. I come from a very literary family. And so she said, no, you actually have to talk about yourself. You have to talk about being a woman in the field, in a very male field. You have to talk about raising children. These things are interesting to people and it makes it credible in some way. And so then I went back and did that again and I had a great time doing it and the only time I realized, when people come up to me and say, I read your book and then they look at me in a certain way and I think, oh my God, it's like they've seen me in my pajamas, you know. Or worse. Or worse, so then it's a little bizarre, but yeah. So looking back on what I considered to be the beginnings of the book, and I'm sure there's a lot more to it, so you want to be an archeologist as a child. You love digging things and discovering things and then you got into the Greeks and you got into classical literature and a humanities education and suddenly the light came on about the theater. Talk about that a little bit. What happened? I have a very unorthodox theater background. So I always say it's odd that I run ACT which has this acclaimed graduate school because I never went to graduate school in theater so I am so envious of our students in a way of getting this training. I did always want to be from when I was in second grade. I always say you get three great teachers in your life. I'm sure if you all closed your eyes, you could think of those three teachers that changed your life. And my first one was Mrs. Dawson in second grade and we did the Greeks and we each had to pick an archeologist and a site and I got to do Epidaurus which is the theater that 40,000 Greeks sat in to go to the theater and I thought it was the most magical, extraordinary thing I'd ever seen and that's what I wanted to do and then my school took us to Greece and we got to stand in that theater and it always captured my imagination. I love Greek, I read DeLar's Greek Myths. That's the first book I ever read. I loved the beginning of democracy I guess. I loved that but I was never a theater person in high school. I did a lot of dance all my life. I loved dance and I always danced and I come from a sort of literary family but not at all theater. So I write this in the book. My freshman year at Stanford, I took ancient Greek because I'd done Latin and I thought well you gotta do Greek if you're gonna excavate. Well Troy is in Turkey. I didn't learn Turkish but I thought you gotta learn Greek. So I went to my ancient Greek class and the first day you learn the alphabet. I'm sort of with my back to you. Is that all right if I do this? More centered like this. Sorry, that's what I just realized. Anyway and you read, you learn the alphabet and then my teacher Helena Foley who's still one of my great heroines. She's at Barnard teaching drama. She gave us Aristophanes the Frogs and the beginning of the frogs in the play they go brekkikikiks, coax, coax, brekkikikiks. As they jump in the frogs, that's the chorus and so I got to call home the first night of college and say that I had read Aristophanes in the original and that was so thrilling. I don't know why that was so thrilling to me but I thought it doesn't get better than this and of course nobody was in the classics department who does Greek, there were six majors. Nobody did it, everybody. Well now Stanford nobody reads any book but at that time, sorry, it's really tragic but at that time a few people did humanities but most people did engineering, now they do IT. So you know, we did these Greek plays. Oh, here's another, I think my other professor who was an amazing, actually tragically the first person I ever knew who died of AIDS, Jack Winkler, a great class assistant gay man, he played the goddess Aphrodite and he did Greek tragedies in his home in Palo Alto and came down the chimney as the Deus Ex Machina. You know, like this is education, it was incredible. So we staged these plays in Greek and the thing about, first of all, working in a language that is not your own is you have to tell that story kinesthetically and vocally and musically in every way you can because your audience doesn't understand. So that's a great way to learn to direct and I also love the language, I love the muscle of the language and I love the idea of a culture in which all year the citizens rehearsed for a play that you did one time, right, one time. So the evanescence of that I thought was incredibly moving, right, and that the people in the play were real people in the community and the writer was Sophocles who was an army general and he was writing about the metaphors of his own culture and then it was done in, you know, the Herodias Atticus right below the Acropolis in order to further the discussion about what is democracy and that I thought that's what the theater was. So for me, that's always what the theater has been. Yeah. Now what about performing? So you're talking about your first experience as if we say nothing about performing in the book at all. I'm not a performer. You're a director right away. Yeah, yeah, no, you know, it's really good to know what you're not good at and boy did I know that. I did act in college somewhat and then I went to Oxford, which was very weird as an American, you know, and I did theater and they don't know where to place you when you're an American and they can't figure out your accent or anything. So they get nervous because they don't know what class you come from and the British don't know what to do when they don't know that, you know. And so I acted in a bunch of plays realizing this was so not my forte but I was already directing and the amazing thing about Oxford is that they don't do it professionally but anybody can do it. So the way you get to direct a play at Oxford is you submit a proposal at your college and they give you like a hundred pounds and you get to do a play but then you have to do everything. You cast it, you produce it, you do the publicity. So I didn't realize I was actually learning to be a producer. In a way it's better than a traditional graduate school because you have to make it up as you go along. Of course I also learned all the things that I am continuing. I get in trouble all the time even though I'm really a good girl, you know. This disastrous first year that I had at ACT was presaged by what I did. So my first play at Oxford was The Satiricon by Petronius, a very famous Roman novel. I didn't make it up, I just adapted it. And I took a vase painting as the publicity and it was as I realized when they blew it up a man with another man's cock in his mouth. But it was an ancient Greek vase painting. Again, I didn't make it up. So I did this and I sent it through the mail to get people to come to The Satiricon. And I was hauled before the scout, they called him and he said, we will not send this through the pigeon post, which was hilarious. And it was a sell out. So that's how I learned. I learned theater marketing, yes. So you get back home from the graduate school experience and you go to New York and you're with the classic stage company. And was that an interview that you did in competition with other people to get that position? Did you create the company yourself or what was that about? I'll tell you the really sad thing, I'm sorry to tell you, but I have learned in my long life, women get hired when it's such a mess, like Theresa May in Britain, right? When the men screw up the entire government, then there's a woman prime minister. This has been my experience getting hired to run organizations. So that's what happened. I got to New York and actually my first gig was at this great place called the International Theater Institute where I was the secretary. And they didn't ever have anything for me to do, so I got to sit in the front. It was fantastic. Meredith Monk walked in and Peter Brook walked in. Peter Brook is coming to ACT, he's 92. And the first time I met him was as the secretary at the International Theater Institute. So these great, and I love global theater and that was a great education. And then I was an intern in the casting office of the Public Theater, which was also a great experience except that Joe Papp told me the director was the father of the cast. But he was great to me and I learned a lot from Joe Papp. And then I was directing at CSC when it almost got closed down because they hadn't paid payroll tax for three years, which is the worst sin you can do. You take money from somebody's paycheck and instead of sending it to the government you keep it, this is really illegal. So the theater was about to be closed down so they hired me. I don't think there was a lot of competition. I think I was 27 and I happened to be in the lobby basically. I mean, I was directing. I was directing skin of our teeth at the time. And again, as my amazing board chair who's here today, Nancy Livingston, I've been lucky with my boards and that was a woman board chair as well. And I think that she looked at me and thought I could believe this, that she didn't look at me as a little girl. She said, what would you think? I mean, I'm kidding. I'm sure other people did apply, but I was really committed to trying to save that theater. The idea that you're in the lobby and that's how you get the job, I know about that. A lot of it happens a lot that way. I'm gonna pause here a minute just to talk about our parallels because we're bringing Junie to the West Coast pretty soon. We're both arrived in the West Coast here in San Francisco at about 1992 or so. We both have 26-year-old daughters. We both have theatrical backgrounds. We're the same person, don't we? Yeah, something like that. We've run into each other a few times. And here we are in 2016, San Francisco, and we still have the whole thing going. And we've actually done a couple things, it's a miracle, isn't it? It's a miracle. So it's really a joy to be on stage with you. It is. So there you are, you're in New York and you turned it around, the classic stage company really did. The good things are happening. You're feeling good about it. You love New York. Family's starting to grow there. And then along comes this opportunity. The word gets out that here in San Francisco, American Conservatory Theater is looking for an artistic director. So what was it like when you first heard about it? How did you decide to pursue it? You know, I was very late to the party because, so I knew about ACT, I went to Stanford. And my first experience in ACT when they still had all those extra balcony seats, you know, those wooden seats up in the third balcony, that's when I first came to ACT. So I sort of knew it. And then I'd been in New York and again, it was all self-taught. You know, when I ran CSE, when it's bankrupt and you have to put it together, you do. And it's where I first worked with Pinter, which I write about in the book, which was an incredible experience and lots of great writers and actors. And so I had never thought about leaving and I had a two-year-old. And it was 1989, which you remember was a cataclysmic year. And that my daughter was born September 2nd, 1989. Chichescu was shot December 21st, which I remember because it was the night my daughter slept through the night. This is how you remember. Yeah. So as the Iron Curtain was coming down and the Cold War was coming to an end, I had an infant and I had a husband who was at the Harriman Institute at Columbia studying Soviet foreign policy. So that was the end of that because the Soviet Union collapsed and I got him the t-shirt that said, end of the Cold War, there goes my career, which really was the end. The end of his career as, you know, Russian studies quickly became third-world studies and you had to study Azerbaijan or whatever. So that was the end and so it was an odd moment in our lives. And I had this baby and I was in rehearsal with Pinter at CSC and the word sort of came out that ACT was looking for an artistic director. And to be completely honest, I mean the chances of me getting this job were so zero that I wrote a letter to apply only because I thought it will be a free trip to California because my mother was teaching at Stanford and I thought, well, I could bring my daughter to see my mother and then I'll have a day in San Francisco. And a practice interview. Yeah, I mean, so it was the most amazing interview with this amazing board. It always was an incredible board but I wasn't even nervous because I thought it's laughable. I mean, I don't look like anyone who's ever had this job. I've never worked in the Lord Theater. It's just not gonna happen. Also ACT was bankrupt in the building lay in ruins, the Geary, that I felt right at home. They took me to the Geary, I was like, oh, I'm an archeologist, I've had ruins, I knew ruins. And about it being in ruins, you did some interesting things with those ruins. Do you remember one of the things that passage in the book about one of the actors who picked up a piece of the ruins and used them in a scene? Oh yes, we did. Yes, well, you remember those of you who were here, that for six years the Geary lay in ruins, partly because they thought there was asbestos and they were very scared about going in there to contaminate and then had Hastings left and there had to be a big campaign and nobody knew how big the campaign was gonna be. It was a long process. And so when I was hired, it was a ruin. And we sort of toyed with the idea of like the bouff de nor in Paris, like leaving part of it ruined because it's kind of magical. The board didn't like that idea at all. So for four years we were in Diaspora, you know, all over the city. I said, this is I'm a Jew, it's my history. I feel good. I'm used to being in with a suitcase going somewhere else. So we were all over the city and we did Antigone with all the rubble from the Geary. And one night Ken Ruda who played Creon found a piece of, you know those rosettes? Yes, I know exactly who he found. He found a piece of it and it sort of stopped him dead in the middle of the show. And we had all the seats that were squashed that we had kept from the earthquake, all the old subscription seats, which ironically were the press seats, you know. Yeah. And so that was really interesting, but it was a very long rebuilding process, a very complicated. Now another parallel is that I'm also dealing with a building that still has not been touched since the 1989 earthquake. So when we renovate, just a few blocks from here, 135 vans, I'll think of you and what you had to do. Oh, it's FEMA. I mean, that was. We still have FEMA money. Chapter in the book, yeah. And I've also photographed the rosettes that we have on that building and I use them as sort of logos and things like that now. So very good stuff. So yes, so there you are. So you're in Diaspora and you're nomadic and finally you get back into the Geary. And that was about, I want to say, 96. January 96, yeah. And what was the first thing you did in the Geary? The Tempest with David Strutharen, who's now here in the Bay Area. And the Cronus Quartet, the most thrilling, is David Lang, who then won a Pulitzer Prize, wrote the music, and the Cronus Quartet was in the pit. I mean, I thought. Yeah, I can't get better at that. That was so great. Yeah, you used music a lot. So when you thought about the theater, you thought about it as a holistic experience. And a lot of different musicians went through and you had a lot of ideas that related to music and how it worked in the theater. I love music and I love the fact, the Bay Area is a great music town. Now it's also become a good dance town. But when I moved here, dance was still nascent and theater is pretty scattered. But music, every kind of music. Jazz world music, cabaret, calypso, symphony, I mean, everything was here. So we did two pieces with Cronus. We did Chanticleer, which was thrilling. We did Kitka, Sanga, Chorus of Hecuba. We did Rova Saxophone Quartet. We did Madigan Shive, the cellist up in the air with wings on. We did Teresa Wong in another cellist. I love cello. We've had, I just, there are great musicians here. And I try to do, now we're using David Coulter, the saw player from the Black Rider. He's doing the music for Thousand Splendid Sons, which we do in January. So it's really fun. It's one of the great things. This is a small town. So unlike in New York, where I found collaboration very difficult, because it was such a big stratified city. Here, I've also worked with the ballet a lot, because I love ballet. That's sort of my favorite art form. And we in San Francisco have the great American Ballet Company, I think, really the best in the country. So I built a piece with the ballet, and that was a great experience to make with Valkana Peroli. So we do a lot of collaborations. Wonderful. So moving backwards in time just a little bit. Oh, your first year is at ACT. I went over that twice in the book, because it's fascinating, and I'm really interested in your emotional state and your strength. It took you to get through a lot of it. But so here you are, you're back in New York, and you get the word that you've got the position. Is that, was that an ecstatic moment? Because I remember at times getting a position through the phone, or some kind of electronic communication and thinking, this is my moment. Did that happen for you? Well, it happened so fast. And also it was a very funny thing. Alan Stein was the head of the board, and he asked me to come to his apartment in New York, and he hired me, but he looked so somber. I thought, it was like somebody saying, okay, you want to do this? Here we go. And so it was kind of overwhelming, and I was flying back and forth every two weeks, and I had a two-year-old. So I was taking the red-eye, so I would get back in time to take her to daycare. I mean, it was very good, I was young. Anyway, and it was, I didn't realize what bad shape ACT was in when I got the job. I was used to running a very small, very broke theater. So this was very big, very broke, which is much scarier. It was really broke. We couldn't make our payroll. The staff had all sort of, it was very demoralized. It's a very odd time to do a capital campaign when you're in such an uncertain period. And so I was just told, it's November, you have to deliver a season by January. Now, if I'd known any better, I would have said, no, that's ridiculous. Somebody else should plan the last year and the next year, and then I will come into it, like Matthew Shilvick was smart enough to say at the opera, this son, but what did I know? I said, okay, and so I did this exercise, which I do when I teach. I teach this class in which we do this thing called what do you have for free, which is like a self-diagnosis about yourself. But you can also do it about anything, about a city. So I thought, okay, San Francisco, what do I want ACT to be, what does it have for free? I went through all the things I could think of, particularly theatrically. So for example, I thought, there has always been a clown tradition in this town. The Mime Troop, the Pickle Family Circus, physical comedy has always been huge in San Francisco. It's never been part of ACT. I want Jeff Hoyle. I want that group of people, Sharon Lockwood, to be part of ACT. Then I was thinking about Irene Forness and the Padua Hills Playwrights Festival and the Magic Theater and Robert Woodruff, great director who did all the early shepherd plays. He did the first Fool for Love, things like that. So I thought, well, I should have him because they love him in the Bay Area and that will be a great thing. And I kind of went down the list like that and I built a season that I thought really would honor San Francisco. And it was an absolute disaster, like a disaster. Okay, and talk about what happened. Now, something happened in the school itself, I think that precipitated some of this. I had sort of planned this season and then I had a managing director who was less than no help because he didn't want me to get the job as he told me immediately when I got there. He had applied for the job to be the general director with two directors under him and he'd made that proposal to the board. The board said, no, we want an artistic director. So when I got there, he's the first person I met and he said, you know, I wanted the job. That's a great way to start. So I said, well, sorry, okay, let's see what we can do. And so he was very hostile anyway, it was awful. And he said to me, you have to have a comedy. And I said, I know, I'll think of something. And he's, because it was like Antigone, the Duchess of Malfi, I mean. And so we ended up with this play, Lend Me a Tenner by Ken Ludwig and I thought of it as a placeholder. I got to the school, this was 1992. Our school was very fraught at the time. It needed new leadership. In the school, they were doing an exercise called rock stars, which was sort of working from the outside in. And a white actress had portrayed Grace Jones and she had put on dark makeup. This, now, we are much more aware now than we were then, but even then, this is a graduate school and this was really bad and upsetting and it was terrible for the students and it's the first thing I heard when I got into the building. So I convened the students and we talked about it and I really heard their point of view and why they thought this, A, we needed far more people of color in the leadership, which they were right and we needed much better policies, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. So I said, we can't do Lend Me a Tenner, which is this sort of stupid comedy about a guy in blackface, not when we've just had this incident in the school. That's really wrong and I didn't know about that so let's change it. So we changed it, which I didn't think was a crime. At my old theater, nobody paid attention. We were a little theater, we changed everything. I didn't realize ACT was the flagship and you do one thing and everybody screams. So we changed it and not only did we change it, but we did this play, The Pope and the Witch by Dario Foe, who then went on to win a Nobel Prize in Literature. But at the time was an unknown Italian clown and it was about abortion. The Pope waking up one day and realizing that he believed in free abortion on demand. Okay, I did not realize that this was such a Catholic city and it was like the perfect storm. Thank God there was no Twitter then because then I would have just been gone. There was no cyberspace yet, but even so. Here is this young naive Jewish girl. I was 32 years old. They called me a girl, you know. I come here, I cancel this Broadway play to do an offensive anti-Catholic play about the Pope and abortion and the whole Catholic church turned out to picket it. And it was at the Marines Memorial. You know that theater on Sutter Street so that which has a big lobby so they could come right into the lobby with the signs and the screaming and it was and then we got all our funding taken away and then this group called the Catholics for Truth and Justice wrote to the NEA and said that all that money should be taken away. The head of the PG&E board was Catholic so we lost our PG&E funding. I mean it was like unbelievable and then they thought I was just politically correct and I didn't care about Catholics but I cared about African Americans. I mean the whole thing was crazy and I had to go sit at the feet of this man called Monsignor Adelini at St. Remember this guy? He'll turned out to be the first one who was gotten rid of when the priest scandals happened. But I didn't know that. So I took the one Catholic board member we had, Patrick Flannery bless his heart. Not that he was practicing but he had a good last name. And so we sat in that church on those little stools and the person who saved me was Dean Allen Jones from Grace Cathedral who came down the hill. It was like a play in his collar. He's on our board now and I still like every day I think he saved me and he looked like God coming down the hill and he said to the assembled picketers you may protest, we can have a town meeting, we can talk about this, you can say anything you want, you may not shut this play down. So let's all go into the theater and we're gonna talk about the play. And that happened and that was the beginning of a lot of community work at ACT which was to say we need to talk about things upfront. We need to contextualize them. We need, this is where our fabulous Elizabeth Brodersen started words on plays which is the dramaturgy we do upfront to say to an audience not to apologize for a play but to say let us contextualize the world of the play, why we chose it, why we thought it was significant so you don't have to like it but we're not doing something to simply provoke and be snarky, we are actually trying to make work that we think matters. So we had barely dodged that bullet when the Duchess of Malfi came along. Great Jacobian drama, one of the great great plays about the abuse of women. Again, I didn't invent this, this is Webster and he wrote it. But Robert Woodruff was in his sort of Camille Palia phase so it was an extremely graphic. Yes, would you hear it? If she's gonna go into it, would you hear this? Very graphic, it's all in the book but I mean it was Randy Danson naked covered in blood being strapped up and the ACT audience by then had become very staid. They were used to a certain kind of pumpkin pants Shakespeare with the British accent and this was, I mean it was kind of an amazing production and kind of a total mess because Robert Woodruff is a great artist who can't work in four weeks and that's something else I've learned as a producer that you must figure out what each artist needs and then try to support that artist but I didn't really know that. So we put this play up and the first preview, the set looked like a giant metal cage and it had sperm or female fluids or something flowing through these tubes, ejaculating and on the day of the first preview the director decided to put the thing on wheels so it could move but it weighed two tons of steel, it was really heavy and so the intermission took 48 minutes which gave the audience 48 minutes I clocked it to scream at me and I mean I stood in the lobby and they just lined up to tell me how much they hated me. This is 1993, we're talking 1998, okay. So 23 years ago and this is what's going on and you're still brand new here basically and they're screaming at you in the lobby. So what's it like when you go home when stuff like that is happening? How do you look through that? Okay so the funny thing is people always say oh my God how did you do this and have a family but you couldn't do this and not have a family. I have the greatest husband in the world and partly because he's British, he's kind of ironic and he never takes anything very seriously and I would come home weeping and say they hate me, they want me to leave and he'd make sort of snide remarks and he was very funny and then I had this fabulous kid, Lexi, my daughter who's 27 now but so you know when you have a child they love you even if you did the Duchess of Malfi, you know like they didn't hold the Duchess of Malfi against me so you know so that saved me kind of and things just got worse and worse and worse anyway and it got to the end of the year and I thought Alan would fire me and I was so ready to go back to New York. I really wanted to go back to New York where I had a community and I was invisible and so what I did didn't cause any stir and I could really experiment. I was shocked at how conservative the audience was here now of course it's changed a lot and I just felt lost and I thought I went to Alan Steins on the top of Russian Hill and I looked out over the bay while he went to get coffee and I remember thinking, God it's beautiful I'm gonna miss this you know and I thought he would say to me that's it and I would have fired me I think and he said you know change is really hard and now you've done it because we had really shaken things up. We had also gotten a whole new audience. I mean a lot of young people came to see this work. People started to get excited. We did Antigone, we did work they'd never seen you know but it was certainly not a great year financially and he said no you've done the hard part now you have to stick it out. Okay well a lot of bravery there that we should be thankful for definitely. That was amazing. So you go into this situation and all these social issues seem to sort of creep into your work and everything you're doing. Did you go into the theater knowing that this was gonna happen and that you had that obligation to be part of the social fabric or did it suddenly come to you then that wow I really have a place here that matters? Well I always you see this is why I believe in regional theater. I think theater should be local and I think the catastrophe of regional theater in America is it has just become a launchpad for Broadway. The regional theater movement is 50 years old this year. ACT is turning 50 but most of the regional theaters this year we have Los Zelda Fitch Handler who founded Arena Stage. Gordon Davidson who founded Center Theater Group. These great titans of the theater why did they found these theaters to say to communities around the country theater is yours. It doesn't have to be commercial. It's not about Broadway. It's not about the bottom line. It is about great ideas and great literature in a community for that community. So you know I've always believed that and I never thought that was being an outlier. I always thought that's why we were in the theater. I never had an aspiration to work on Broadway and now I'm a total outlier because of that but I still feel that way. I don't think enhancement money is a good idea. I don't think any of that's a good idea. So you know I wanted to be part of this community. It took a long time. It's a great thing to have children because you get to know the community as a parent. I also started riding my bike so that I could kind of discover the city that way which I really love. Like it gives you a different lens on the city and I just tried to get involved in other things and figure out what people were thinking here. I do think this is a hard city to figure out. It's a hard city to move to. It has a million different pockets and political agendas and everything and it took me a really long time and in fact it wasn't until the recession that I realized that the only way we were gonna stay relevant and alive is if every year we started making work, a piece at least that was about San Francisco. And that's when you know Tales of the City happened, the Armistice Mopin and after the war the Philip Gotanda and Humor Abuse, the Lorenzo Pizzoni and Tosca Cafe with Val and every year Monstrous, the Filipino Project we just did at the Strand. So now every year we're making a piece that's ours for us with us and that's how you learn about a community and a community comes to you and says here's our story or here's something we're interested in. So it's been a long journey and something that's really grown over the years at ACT but it was something that I always thought was important. Yeah, because I worked across the Bay for nine years I have to relearn a lot of things coming back here that you're right, it's something very particular here, very specific, you had a lot of pockets as you said and there's something great about that but also very challenging. Yeah, yeah. So let's shift gears a little. Let's talk about some people that you came across in your travels or your journeys through the theater. Some fascinating characters, Bill Ball. See, I never knew Bill Ball. Okay. Even though I rehearse in the Ball Studio we named the studio after him. So this year I read all everything because Michael Pallar, our dramaturg, has written the book of ACT's 50th which is out next spring. And I thought, God, I can't believe I never knew this man. He was completely brilliant and completely crazy from what I gather and imploded utterly at the end but set a standard that was extraordinary that I have tried to live up to. The idea being that artists should be in lifelong learning, that art is experiential, not classroom based, in other words, that young artists learn from master artists by working with them together on the stage like a teaching hospital. My father was a great physician, he was a great teacher, so I always thought that was the ACT model that the master physician teaches the young intern and that's how you learn. And that's still what we do at ACT all these years later. And he had a big foot in the community so we've really tried to keep that up even though probably the literature and stuff has changed a lot. So what about some other great actors, great performances that just blew away? There are a lot of actors in the book. Olympia Dukakis is my sort of great mentor and she's really been my mentor for 30 something years. I've directed her many times, many times, she's on our board, she ran a great theater and she, you know, my early years at ACT when I would come back from board meetings like weeping because they thought I didn't know how to read a balance sheet or I felt like, you know, I would never keep the place going in one way or another, you know, and I would call her and say Olympia, you know, what a disaster this is and she'd scream into the phone, she's Greek and she's like, we're really loud when we get together. She'd go, Carrie, it's the patriarchy! You know, okay. She'd be screaming, it's 2,500 years of the patriarchy, it's not gonna change overnight. I'm like, okay, okay, great. So she always reminded me and when we got back to the Geary we did a blessing and she read Breck's poem, this beautiful Breck poem about the Berliner ensemble and then she read Lorca's poem about theater being a gift of beauty in a cup so that the public can drink it and in drinking it know themselves. It's an incredibly beautiful poem and so she has always changed my life over many, many years. There's a lot in the book about writers like Stoppard. So I met Stoppard my second year here when we did Arcadia. When I started writing him letters, asking him questions, we did the first production outside New York of Arcadia and then I met him in the National Theater Bar that year and we got along immediately. I was terrified to meet him, you know, he's Tom Starbert and as soon as I met him, I thought, oh, I know you because he's really an Eastern European Jew. Yeah, he's exactly my family background. Okay. And he's just my tribe. I looked at him and I thought, oh, yeah, oh, yeah. Like Pinter, Pinter was the same. I wanna get into Pinter, yeah. So I'm working Thomas in town right now. I almost dragged him here tonight, but he was so tired because I made him rewrite a big scene today. But he did. And you listen, he actually did it. He actually did it. Scene four of the Hard Problem, if you come and see it, is now new and you will be the first to ever have seen it. So he's extraordinary to work with and has just been a fascinating journey for me as someone who loves learning, every Stoppard play is like graduate school. So you have to learn about Heisenberg and then you learn about Byron and then you learn about A.E. Hausman and then you learn about Dupecek and communist politics in Prague. And you know, in this one you learn about neuroscience. It's sort of amazing. Right, right. Now there's a long passage in the book about Harold Pinter, who I always just not knowing about him, but knowing his plays found him to be too set and very, I always thought a great distance from humanity, but you actually paint a much different picture. I adored him. He was also terrifying in a different way. Exactly like his plays, he made no small talk. So he'd say, it's Harold. Long pause. Call me back like this, you know, or whatever. I remember the first time I called him actually, his voicemail, his message machine said, I'm not in, long pause. Here's the beep. You know, it was like that. And you were just spinning, I read that yesterday. I hung up. I was like, oh, what do I say? So I hung up. But you know, I talk about Pinter in the chapter that's about aesthetic. And the reason I bring that up is that I think we rarely use that word in the field. We think it's a dirty word. There was a liability. Well, it's sort of, people think it's elitist or peculiar or whatever to say, this is my aesthetic. I don't understand that because if you go to a restaurant, a chef will always say, this is the kind of food I make. You would never expect any great chef to make every kind of food. They make this kind of food. And I think artists have aesthetics and that's a good thing. It's what you believe. Obviously you wanna be as broad as you can be, but you have to claim that. And we don't do that in the American theater. We say something for everybody and whatever. And so I'm always interested in what is somebody's individual voice? That's what's interesting. What's the light behind the eyes of an actor, a writer, a director, a designer? What's their signature? How do you know who they are? So when you work with a playwright, the minute you meet them, you think, oh. So with Pinter, he was fierce, no small talk, incredibly smart, incredibly sexy, very powerful, and a great actor. He was a real actor. Stopper has never acted, which is why his notes, oh my God, his notes are hilarious and they're so obtuse. Because you have to figure out how, not obtuse, is the wrong word, abstruse, is that the right? I don't know. It's really hard to follow and you have to then make it an acting note. Pinter gave the best notes because he was an actor. Got it. So he would give you one note that you could act, like we did the birthday party and Jean Stapleton, you remember wonderful Jean Stapleton, she played Meg. And Meg is this dotty woman and the opening scene of the birthday party, she keeps asking her husband, Pety, to read her out loud on the newspaper. And so it was really an odd thing. And she kept saying, have you read any good bits yet? So I said, Harold, why is she doing that? And we were full of psychological questions about their marriage. Why was their marriage like this? What did it mean about them? And he did a long pause and then he said, I believe she's forgotten how to read. Now this is a great note because that's such a thing you can play. She would like Babylon Jean in her way and she'd look longingly at the newspaper wishing for gossip that she couldn't access. And so that's just actable. So he did that all the time. And then I do, and there's a story in the book also about my daughter because she was 10 days old when I worked with Pinter because the dates that I had were all screwed up. And I thought she was gonna be born in August and she wasn't born until September. And he came a week later to do his play Mountain Language and he hates children, that's what I'd heard. So we put her in the dressing room and Jean would come out and go, the princess needs you now. And then I would go and nurse her. And I thought we'd really pulled it off and he'd never noticed that there was this child. And she's a great sleeper, like she's still, she goes to Yale Law School where you get like three hours of sleep a night as no problem. She can sleep anywhere on the floor of the law school. I've seen her like she travels the world so she could always sleep. So she was asleep most of the time. And one day we were doing Mountain Language and he was trying to get Peter Rieger who played the political prisoner to emote about the fact that he would never see his child because he'd been in prison. And Peter was having none of it. And Harold left the room, went into the dressing room, picked up Lexi in the carry-cott, came into the rehearsal, put her on the table. She's sleeping and he says, Peter, this is your child, you're imprisoned for no good reason by the regime that you will never see your child. Now play the scene. So Peter's like shaking. I think he started to cry. He was like completely non-plus and he did the scene and it was kind of fantastic. And then Harold said thank you and he picked up the baby and he took her back to the dressing room. And that was that. And he never mentioned it again. Now do you ascribe to that as an acting style? Well, actually I was going to ask you another question about your aesthetic, we'll get to that. But since you brought this particular story up, what do you think about techniques like that? Are you a method director? Do you believe in that deep psychological intensity? Well, he wasn't in fact, but it was really funny. He did it because he was so peeved with. You know why he did it? And this is something I really learned. He hated his plays being called Theater of the Absurd and he hated the notion of abstraction. To him, his plays were distilled reality. They were not abstract. They were absolutely real. They were just stripped away. And so it bothered him that Peter treated it as abstract and so he wanted that real baby in there. It wasn't that he was doing a sort of Stella Adler on it. No, I mean, I don't tend to direct by tricking an actor into an emotional response because the genius of acting is it has to be repeatable. You know, and I so revere actors because everything they do has to look freshly minted. Everything has to look as if it's for the first time. And yet you have to be able to do that eight times a week. So when you scare an actor into doing something, which I've seen lots of teachers do, or startle them or manipulate them into doing something, it dehumanize, it diminishes them in some way. It treats them like a child, but it also means they won't replicate it. What you do wanna do is open the field of possibilities. Do you know to see if by shaking it up in another way, something else emerges? And I think that emotion is very physical and that if you're stuck in a scene and you can move it around, you can change the status, you can put somebody on the floor and somebody far away, something else happens, yeah. Because there's so many different styles and techniques going about it, but the replicability is important as you stated. So I've got some interesting quotes here from the book that I think I'd like to explore with the audience a little bit. Like you had a friend who said once that every night you have 1,000 people held hostage in the theater, so you better be very clear about why you chose such and such of a play. And that's our friend Liz Perly, whom we all lost last year, but we think of her often. Well, I thought it was a really great reminder. People are held hostage and they don't have to be there. And I loved it that Liz said that because I've never looked at the audience as the enemy. I mean, I think you have to talk up to an audience and eventually you meet them somewhere. I think audiences are smart and want something exciting to happen. But you know, they're busy people and tired people. People are really tired now and exhausted and attention spans are much, much shorter. And so it is your job to figure out why you've asked them to give you two hours of their life. How about the play you wrote in that light? See, people are not just coming to the theater but they're coming to the theater to see something you wrote. Oh, well that's really terrifying. Yeah, I bet, yeah. You don't want to talk anymore about that? You know, my writing career started early and then I stopped for a long time and then I went back to writing and I kept it completely separate from ACT and I never thought the two things should go together and I did my plays around the country, other places and then my play hire won an award that came with money and you know, when you're at theater and you get money, you do the play. So we did it and it marked the late Mark Grocker directed it and it was a great experience actually but that was really terrifying, yeah. Sure. You were talking about something in the book that you called the British Linguistic Code and you talked about a sort of a distance and an irony as opposed to Arthur Miller, for example, who you don't like that much, you think is too confessional. I know, isn't that terrible? I've got- I played Eddie Carboni in A View From the Bridge. I bet you were great. Thank you. I know. My family didn't think so. You know, it's so funny. I was not, you know, I come from European parents and then I started working on sort of international literature and it is odd that I'm not an Americanist. I mean, and I admit that. And so I've hired other directors to do those plays. I love the elliptical quality of language. I'm not so much interested in theater as therapy directly or theater, I love metaphor. That's why I love the Greeks. I love things that cast an idea in a different mode or that I do it in some bigger way or more epic way like our August Wilson. You know, August Wilson will take a nugget of an idea and make it like a jazz poem. So there's something, Arthur Miller's just not for me. I understand he's a great playwright. There's something about that on the noseness that doesn't appeal to me. I also inherited the Geary Theater. The Geary Theater is not a good real theater for realism. It is not a good theater for box sets or for small living room drama. You need to penetrate that proscenium. And it means you need poetic language, you need music, you need muscle, you need scale, you need Stephen Adley-Gurgus, who wrote Between Riverside and Crazy, you need, do you know that kind of playwright, Beckett, you know, Pinter, whose language has muscle. And that I love. I have a beautiful quote here that you wrote about Harold Pinter. You say that he has a wider poetic air that rescues him from didacticism or literalness. So that's a beautiful quote that you wrote about what you thought of his work. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, I feel that way. You know, I don't think, you know that, I mean, I think everything in it is absolutely true. But for instance, one of my most, most favorite lines is in Betrayal, when the couple is falling apart and she looks at him and says, I don't think we don't love each other. And that double negative is like genius. It's genius to tell you everything about a love affair that's fallen apart, but you need language like that, yeah. Yeah, it's also the play where he works in reverse, am I correct? Where he starts, you start at the president, you go back into the past, see my scene, and it'll be at one point. Yeah, okay. So getting into the modern theater, and what our responsibility is here, what your responsibility is, how do you feel about the way things are playing out for you and for the American Conservatory Theater here in San Francisco in 2016? Well, you know, I'll tell you, you never get smug doing this job because the landscape is changing so fast and it's always new and you're never caught up. We are awash in an absolutely epic demographic change in this town. I don't have to tell you all that because you live here presumably. And a change in values and in what is central to what we care about. We've lost most of our bookstores. Thank God City Lights is still there. Please go buy a lot of books there. And we at ACT just opened The Strand, which lies in this vortex that I, on the one side is what I call the tech tsunami, right? So we are half a block from Dolby, Twitter, Spotify, Pandora, Zendesk, right there. On the other side is Sixth Street, which has been in Filipino for many years and very poor. And then we've got politics on both sides, right? Nancy Pelosi can look out her window and see The Strand. We got City Hall on the other side. So what is happening in this city? Who is leading this discourse? What is the city that we want to become? You know, and I think the fact that the bulk of new labor in this town is working in an industry that has a very particular zeitgeist is a challenge for us. Those workers are mostly high above the city in offices that they don't descend from easily, which means that people like us who want them to come into our lobbies and buy a drink and buy a ticket and go see a show, they're not even on the street. So forget walking into the theater. I mean, we're the street traffic. That's not an industry that does street traffic. It's also not an industry that does live immersive events because it's another kind of industry. So, but we must accept that's the industry. So what do we do about that? How do we make that part of our lives? How do we who care about live performance or immersive things or literature or emotional intelligence or complexity or empathy or all of those things that you teach every day in arts education in the schools, how does that story continue to be valued, particularly by an industry that thinks it's the most creative thing in the world, that will not, that has no interest in us as they've disrupted everything and they think, I don't even use the word nonprofit anymore when I go into this building because that is just it's badge of failure. They just think, right, oh, well, then you really must prove it. You're not making a profit. Then you are really a loser and you know, if I ran my business, excuse me, the way Twitter runs its business, I would be out of a job now. I mean, we make more profit than Twitter. So, but, and that is like. I didn't know that. Oh yeah, they have no bottom line. So, but, but it's just an interesting thing. So, we're really working hard to figure this out. So for example, we got a Duke grant to connect Asian-American tech workers and Asian-American theater makers and what we discovered is lots of people working in the tech industry self-identify as artists, but that's where they're making their living. But they want to be part of the arts community. They don't want to be considered the enemy. They're not there to colonize. We found three musicians at Pandora who didn't know each other and through that meeting they met each other and they're all making work. So, I always feel hopeful. I think there are lots of ways to make this happen, but I think it's a big task. And you've done something like this before. You were one of the first and most multicultural theaters in the country. Yes. And how did that come about? Well, I credit Ed Hastings enormously and Bill before him. They were doing what we call non-traditional casting or American casting way before anybody else was doing it. You know, it was remarkable the people playing roles in Noel Coward. There were Asian-Americans, African-Americans, Hispanic actors. It is a huge passion of mine. It always has been a huge passion of mine, in part because I'm greedy for the best actors you can get. And if that's B.D. Wong, put him in it. If that's Joe Morton, put him in it. If, you know, whatever. So, I've always cast really broadly. I think it's the most exciting thing about the American theater. And I also think, you know, we should, you know, it worries me that we're losing classical theater in this country because people think that it's old white men. We can do classics from anywhere in the world. We just did The Orphan of Jawa, great Chinese classic. There are amazing plays from many different cultures that are to be accessed. And I also, being a Greek scholar, can tell you that ancient 5th century Athens was not white, all white. It was not all, it had Persians. It had Egyptians. I mean, it was, we are naive that way in the judgments that we make. So, I'm really interested in, you know, plurality. And I think that is the question of our time as Americans. Why is inclusion such a fraught topic around the country? We blame it on immigration, but that's just a thing to blame because difference is complicated. And storytelling is always a great and amazing solution to that, to actually encourage people to tell their own stories in ways that you start to realize are extraordinarily cohesive and that people from very different cultures sort of share certain basic needs and wants and desires, but also the forms that different cultures use to make theater are magical and very different. You know, what I learned from Philip Gotanda is a form of Japanese and Japanese American theater that was completely new to me. You know, we are now talking about how business and industry really is interested in students who have humanities backgrounds. They like the connectivity. No, you hope so. Yeah, you hope so, but it's kind of a contradiction to what we're talking about. When you're looking at the tech industry, you're looking at a lot of different factors here. And yet we're hearing more and more that humanities education is important, that 12% of the economy, the California Arts Council has been saying this, 12% of the economy here in California is the creative economy. And I happen to chair the California Arts Council and have for two years now when we're trying to make sense out of that message. And at the same time, look at what's going on in the universities and look at what's going on in the tech industry. And it's all not fitting together in a very easy way. It's not fitting together because going to university now creates so much debt that students are forced to feel that I think if their education isn't instrumental, it will not be worth the investment, right? And so basically, and I'm certainly many great thinkers have said this, you know, the humanities is about the why, right? And instrumental, you know, let's say engineering is about the how. One without the other. So if you don't have the why, if you don't have those big questions, then the how do you do it becomes it's like a trade school. So, and yet, I mean, I think it's really hard for an 18 year old to choose to study literature at university when they're gonna graduate with $100,000 of debt and be told what are you gonna do with this degree? Because we look at those degrees as instrumental. What we're learning 10 years down the road is that nobody knows how to write a sentence or, you know, write a memo or stand up at a board meeting and give us a presentation. We need to solve a problem. Because they never had to do it, you know? And so they use ridiculous jargony awful tech language. I always laugh. It's when now verbs are used as nouns like what is the solve that you really know, you know you're in huge trouble. And this is like- What is the solve? Yes, we're gonna tentpole that one. You know, I mean, it's like, it's just, you know. A linguist, we're not gonna get away with that with her. Right, you gotta call it out. It's just embarrassing. It's awful. It's a complete diminution of the English language. And, you know, really, right? And I think if you can't speak well, you can't think well, right? I mean, that's just what it is. But so after the fact, I think we're starting to realize that we are, we're gonna have a workforce that is really hard pressed to do the things that we want it to do. We have a Boeing senior VP who's going around the state saying that the humanities, and his experience as a stage manager at high school is what gives him all this problem-solving abilities, communication abilities. So we're hearing some of this, but it's a long road up. Well, the other thing that's interesting, it's really true about drama is about emotional intelligence. So you know, children have to learn to look at somebody and read from what they're doing or do you know what's happening between two people. What are the signals being sent? If you don't learn that, and it is learned behavior, it's how you socialize. It's how you imaginative play. It's things like status. You know, when children play a status game and say, I get to be the mommy or whatever. And then you play that out and you watch a child do it. Those are ways that you learn to negotiate human experience. The less you've read complex literature where you've watched people negotiate and the less you've ever gotten to see it on stage, the less you know how to model that behavior. You have to see somebody do it. It's also why diversity matters. You have to see people who are not like you living through experiences to understand that they're not the other. It's exactly the same thing, right? But you know, that is hard to test and you know better than anyone that when you are teaching to the test and that's what schools are doing now, advocating arts education is harder. Let me say about teaching to the test since you brought it up. We're not gonna do that anymore. No child left behind has been sunsetted. Yeah, good. But it lingers like many things for a long time. So I never liked it anyway. Never talked to the test or had anybody do it. But we really have the license. And in fact, we had the license a lot earlier than we thought we did. In 2006, that law should have died. It lingered for nine years. So we have to be aware of that. And as an educator, I tried to be, but it lingered and it was hard to get rid of. And I would just say this one thing because I also really argue this in the book. The flip side is the arts are not squishy. They're not vague. They're not some kind of frivolity that you do. Did you all watch before they took them all off the air the Wells Fargo ads that said, you know, I used to be a ballerina, but now I'm a biophysicist. It's like. It's all true. You know, that we have to stop. It is incredibly important to say the to build a play is as hard and engineering feet as to build a bridge. And it has, it is, you know. And so I think we have failed utterly in the university level because we teach performance theory or something in this kind of incredibly, I don't know, vague way instead of actually reading a great play and saying what makes a doll's house, let's say an Ipsen play stand up. And then you learn about things like, you know, exposition. How do you do that? How do you get the past into a play in a way that doesn't feel like exposition? How do you detonate suspense? I mean, Ipsen's a master at it. You know, how do you pay that out, right? How do you create conflict? Well, how does conflict get resolved? What is that? How do you build to a play? At what moment should that happen? These are craft things like, you know, like anything, like making a bridge stand up. And if you don't learn that craft, it's like color theory for a painter. It doesn't mean then that you have to follow Mondrian, but if you never learn color theory, you're gonna be hard pressed, you know? And if you never learn to draw, you can't break those rules. And I feel like in the arts, we're really loath to treat them with rigor. But the arts deserve that respect. Writing deserves that respect. Creative writing, poetry, painting, dance, deserves that respect. These are rigorous, amazing disciplines. You know, anyone who read your book and didn't understand the rigor that went into every day of the work that you do, just not have been reading the book. I saw the rigor there and the intensity and everything you needed to produce on a daily basis. I was interested in something we discussed a little bit earlier about aesthetics and why that was sort of a liability almost. And what would you call the Kerry-Perloff aesthetic? What is it you like to look at? What is it you like to hear and see? So what is your theater express about you? Well, you can tell I love to talk. So I love language. I love great language. I love theatrical language that in some way wakes you up. You know, I don't know if you saw Between Riverside and Crazy just this time last year, but he's a great example. He's like a great street poet. And then you look at Mike Bartlett, who wrote the play we're doing right now, King Charles III, All in Iambic Pentameter. I mean the Hutzpah, it's incredible. You know, I think that's wonderful. I think there are cliches about realism as if that's how people really speak, but when you really listen to how people speak, it's fantastic. Annie Baker, we're gonna do Annie Baker next spring. She anatomizes the English language in a way that is so wild and incredible and unnerving. It's sort of amazing. So I love language. I love plays that have ideas. I love plays that wake me up to a world I didn't know. I love plays that acknowledge themselves as play. So I like direct address. I like Brecht. I like the fact that somebody talks right to an audience member. I don't know why we have to pretend the audience isn't there. They're there. That's part of clowning. That's why I love Bill Irwin. You know, Bill's ability, it is not pandering, but to have a dialogue with an audience is thrilling. And so I love that. I love physical, kinesthetic work. You know, movement on stage. How you can tell a story without language. Like the overcoat that we did that was a whole story with no text, I think is amazing. Or a light cue that can tell the tale. So I guess I love theater that asks to be theater that isn't television that's not film that doesn't pretend to be something else, but that actually celebrates this surreal and wonderful fact that we're up here and you're there and we're all in the same room pretending that an experience is going on. It's kind of wonderful. Yeah. So we're going to open this up to questions in just a few minutes. I have one final question for you. Could you give us a moment or a play or some special moment that was a surprise to you in your career at the American Conservatory Theater? Was there an actor who just jumped out of their shoes at you or something so special that you want to relay it to us as a way of closing? You know, it happened, I have lots of ones, but one I always think about, Anika Noni Rose. You know Anika who's a wonderful actress. She in her second year was asked to play and had a gobbler in the school. And, you know, she did it and it was credible, but she felt sort of straight jacketed. But she was a student. And one of the most surprising things that's ever happened to me in my whole time at ACT is I got a knock on the door and Anika walked in the room. She was like 20. And she said, can I speak to you? And I thought, okay. She said, Dad, and she said, you saw Heta? I said, yeah, she said, it sucked, right? I said, it sucked. And I said, well, no, you know, and she said, no, I know. I know. I finished that run and I thought, I didn't get it, why? And then I could say to her, because it had none of you in it. So here's Anika Noni Rose, this incredible, beautiful, complicated African-American woman. And she's trying to do something she thinks is Norwegian or Ibsen or whatever. And it had nothing to do with herself. And what was amazing was I didn't say that. She walked in the room as a student and said that was not enough, was it? I know that. And it was such a great moment. I'll never forget it. And I think it's why she's had such a great career because she learned that the only thing you can do as an artist, the only thing is use yourself. And to be truthful, she used herself. That's it, that's all we have is ourself. And so what is your barometer? Not what the press tells you. Not what your Twitter feed tells you. Not what, you know, but was I true in some way to myself? And it was just, anyway, I always thought about that moment. And what's great about that is it really sums up the theater in many ways, what we gained from it, what the actors themselves gained from it and the whole personal connection to it. So with that, I think it's a great note to close on. So thank you to Karen Frohloff, who's just absolutely wonderful and brilliant. And we are so lucky to have her here in San Francisco.