 has been imposed into us in the middle of perhaps the most contestant election in the history of the United States, but most expensive one as far as we know from the engagement was the biggest participation ever, the biggest mail whatsoever. And we are in the middle of it. We still do not know who might be declared president. It might actually happen in during this evil talk. We do not know. We have with us Andy Lerner, who is an actor in New York sitting just last night. He was with us for our American premier reading of Albert Camus Revolt and Asturias that went back to the beginning, the prequel, the prelude to the Spanish Civil War. On an election night, the play started with you did at the White Box in Harlem. As our contribution, there's something Camus very first play in his workers theater with collaborators. He wrote it's a clearly political work of a devastating revolt of minors. 2000 people died. The foreign legion troops of the Spanish Army was sent there. So that was a reminder of what can happen at the election night. So now it looks like that what is close to the heart of theater artists, the idea of change of equality of fairness of access of inclusion, you know, might have been heard in America. We do not know yet it's going back and forth, but science are looking at something is changing and we keep you posted. Andy, who is with us, will let us know in case any announcement will be done so you can stay with us in case you take this as a little break, a little oasis in the day of an election that is historic, that is significant and that will change our lives and also for the life of this planet. I think we all think it is important. So many artists here on Cedro talks that we wish we had a vote. We could also help to decide what happens in America because what happens here in fact so many people in that idea of that shining place, you know, we all have to fight for, you know, it was in danger and still is. So artists have been on the right side of the struggle for freedom on the right side, the struggle for justice on the right side for a change and in this complex struggle and art is a way to be part of it, to look at things, to have an arena where ideas can be fought out with some rules and but it is something where you can look at many, many facets of a situation, as Michael Frayn said when he came to the Cedro Center on a good play. Everyone is right, but there is a bigger picture like this place we talked about so much here, the Brechts, Galileo, the Antigone, you know, they teach us they are laws, but again they govern humanity and we have to be reminded of and this is the work of artists and with us today we really do have two artists who have been significant workers in the field of theater and the political. They are part of what we would say, the cornerstones of a New York city, a vineyard of theater of the political for decades they have been engaged in using theater in presenting work that challenges us, that thinks about to think about what we do in our lives and families in our cities but also in our societies and in the world as living beings, as humans and what meaning we have and should give to us. With us is George Patenyev who began his professional acting career at the age of 14 in 1947 and he worked with the great, great Harold Klurman who actually was a CUNY professor at the time and of course the group theater is such a significant part of history and he's been working with Karen Malpeet who is here with us ever since and they founded the old beginning theater three collaborative it's a very long a list of works they have done George is mostly well known also for his work I will be a witness the Holocaust diaries of Victor Klamp or a great professor of romance languages who survived as Jewish professor at Germany sometimes hidden road diaries they have been rediscovered and George left as a young kid Berlin in the Kurfürsten Straße and went head to flee with his family the day Victor Klamp was started to write or the week his diaries so it's quite a significant engagement. Karen Malpeet produced her first play of 22 in 1974 she worked with the great, great Joseph Tchaikin who came up so often also in our talks from here and Judas Molina from the living theater a good friend of us also at the Siegel theater we were the place where she went when she was still out there in the actors old age home she often came up to us and Judas Molina directed her us and George Patenyev started start in it and they won an obi and she did so so much the three collaborative theater company of course a list of plays stun everywhere theater for the new city La Mama New York theater workshop classic stages and also London Paris Berlin have they be done they did a play ontology plays in time and she has been published by La Ertis press the great La Ertis press which we like a very much applause and Rutledge and online the canyon review so both of them have seen a lot as a combined experience of working in this theater Spence you know over a century so Karen and George welcome first of all it's a great honor to have you guys here what a crazy day how are you feeling what are you up all night where are you thank you thank you Frank first of all thanks for having us go hurry up all night yes we couldn't help but be up all night this is the most important election ever in my lifetime and also so I mean it's incredible and it's a real cliffhanger and and it's going to affect everything we do and think for the next who knows it depends on on whether we survive this depending on the outcome which is like razor edge so so I think we're all waiting for that I think you know I'm struck by all the commentators saying we have to count every vote and of course we do have to count every vote but then every vote goes into the electoral college which is a slaver's relic right if we were counting every vote Joe Biden would be president right now Hillary Clinton would have been president Al Gore would have been president and life would be presumably different the other thing that just politically that's been on my mind is that if we had a national health care if if president Obama when he had the senate and the house had gone for national health Medicare for all instead of for the affordable care program I don't think we'd be in this situation either I think people would have experienced what democratic socialism can do for everyone and it wouldn't be a scare word used to turn the state of florida keep the state of florida red etc so those are my quick political thoughts but let's talk about theater also yeah what are the latest projects are you can't separate the two but no yeah it goes like a and carriage it does go it does go together but still how do you look at this moment if you go around the city of new york your beloved city where you did most of your work also in america what how do you feel in this country at the moment as artists you know we live on we live in berkland the republic of berkland and in when the black lives matter movement started in july uh the protests came up to kelvin which is where we live many of the berkland protests because there's a precinct at the end of our block so we joined those protests immediately and out of that i out of that and the covid crisis and uh my reading of euripides compulsively since this all started i wrote a new play called chore two which is one of the two plays that we are now working on and this will be an international collaboration with avar zipperdipulo who you've had on the show um and she asked actually asked me to write the play for a book that she's editing so try two looks at the covid crisis the climate crisis and the black lives matter crisis in a poetic and and wild uh wacky way uh many layered and many dimensional um uh and you always read a play in the moment it was written and then you read it against the history of the moment that it's in and although this play is very new the moment that it was written in in the summer is a bit different than this moment and uh this is a crisis moment of democracy um will this country uh end its democratic run which i don't think it will and i hope it won't but we're all sort of uh will it fall like trey um or will it reconstitute itself in some more just equitable way so what do you guys think what will happen one doesn't predict the future but uh you put you put the possibilities out i mean we are a transformational theater and we do work for positive change and we show how that happens in each play that we do including Troy too so and and Karen always has a story that's totally from the audience and and you know from the audience and also uh into the future of what could be instead of what is and uh that that opens up people people uh to the situation and then they uh they really identify with the situation the way it is i mean that's one of the things that's so brilliant in what Karen does with a story that becomes the society uh is a reflection of what the society is going through and uh because she's a language poet uh it it heightens uh the political aspect of it you know so it's uh we have to think of other people and what they do and what they want and uh that's uh that's what always people say after they see the plays they say oh if only this country could really see this play uh you know and and that's one of the great uh benefits of that keeps you going because i mean that is the reason you do theater like this uh because it reaches people in a much more visceral way and and uh it's it's it's really more thrilling to me also because i've been involved in political theater for most of my life and uh this is uh the poet that uh does this all the time so i'm honored to be with uh this playwright thank you and i i with this actor producer director but we we talk a lot about lineage we too speak a lot about lineage not only uh i mean erwin pescotta who george's george studied a studio and met jubith melena when he was a teenager even younger and they were in a play together at pescotta's studio uh homage to kamu by the way um we read the plague the minute the plague our pandemic started we read it out loud to each other i used to teach kamu's uh state of siege um uh great play um but then uh joe chacon who you mentioned um these these judith and julian beck of course um people we worked with and knew very well um and who who were the ground on which we stand of being a transformational theater so i was thinking preparing for this talk that years ago i saw the open theater do a little play called the eating of the corpse which was during the vietnam war and it was actors very uh aggressively and very realistically eating the pieces of an actor who was uh prone on a table who was a a vietnam soldier who had been killed in vietnam and devouring the corpse and and just last week uh uh zoom reading of my play uh dinner during yemen which was done in 2018 at the signature theater was redone and that is a play about two american diplomats two female american diplomats eating this elaborate dinner while they discuss the the starvation in yemen and the american policy of selling bonds to the saudis so those two play the open theater play from way back then and dinner during yemen kind of came together in my mind as two plays about eating but uh two plays about eating the world we might say so all of this heritage that we feel very fortunate to have lived through lives in us now as we go forward as we do our work now yeah yeah i think um let's go for a moment to end the i sound like cnn no but something happened andy do we have an update yes just as a five minutes ago cnn has projected that biden will win um three of the four electoral votes so that isn't a flip from the 2016 election but earlier on trump was leading in both of the congressional districts in main and they have just projected that biden will actually take three of the four so that is our district now three of the four electoral votes yeah while we while we talk things are happening as actually always um in the world even if we do a theater things happen and at the same time and we are often not aware what really is happening it's hidden from our eyes i think that what we're you know one of the things that we're all kind of in shock about is is how large the trump vote is uh in this election i mean with every virtually every public intellectual every artist all the artists against trump all the groups i belong to again speaking against this president for a number of reasons racism climate change the fate of the climate hangs in the balance and we are an eco theater we've done many plays all of our plays have an eco dimension for years and years um uh so climate race um gender uh women's rights all of this hangs in the balance and with virtually as i said every public intellectual every artist in the country uh opposing the current president to see such a huge vote uh huge popular vote for him is is after the way he handled the pandemic yes it's so shocking it's it's it you you almost don't know where to put it in in some ways it's a cultural failure it's a it's a it's a it's a educational failure and and as i say it's a failure of of showing people what a democratic socialist country could be like the example i'm using is national health and i do think if we had national health we wouldn't be in this position at all the pandemic would be more managed um and uh trump would not have ever even been elected in the first place that's much less being in this moment right now um the the yeah George yeah no i mean i i i think you know uh there's a terrible tendency uh because uh uh america the population in america always wants moderation and they don't want revolution they don't want that kind of change because they they ran away from countries who were extreme in their uh exercise of power and and uh over people and so they want to be left alone most of the time and so what is completely terrible is that when you have that kind of atmosphere somebody can come in and look like a strong uh leader and people project what they want um to him and i think that's one of the tragedies of of this election is that people identify they'd rather have what appears to be a strong leader than to have somebody uh who is like a nice guy and uh is is nice on every issue uh it doesn't work you know the menchivics and the Bolsheviks proved that we they all succumbed to that we did a play in 2011 on the 10th anniversary of 9 11 we were in new york on 9 11 and i worked closely with survivors and witnesses of the 9 11 attacks um but this was a play about the american torture program called another life in which there's a character handle who george played who is who very much prefigured donald trump in in the way that he acted both well towards everyone um and and the way that he manipulated the language uh the way he used language to manipulate people um and we used to say back then when we were doing this this play and we were working with every night we had somebody from the aclu or the or the center for human rights or the you know we had we had the anti torture people who were defending um the guantanamo uh torture victims and other torture victims and everybody said if we do not prosecute the torturers torture will come home to the united states and when president obama i don't mean to pick on president obama because he's actually in this in the scheme of things a bright light but i will say when he said um uh we have to look forward not backwards we all we all just knew the torture would come home and we would see this kind of police brutality escalate because who are the who you know this is a this is a revolving door you go over to a rack and you torture an apu grave and you come home and where do you get a job either as a prison guard or in a police department so the the torture training is is cyclical and if you don't prosecute torturers and you don't say the torture is absolutely illegal and immoral you get it back it comes back to you and that's what we've seen this summer with so many shootings and not just this summer but this summer sort of you know most closely um yeah but but uh george played this character uh who ends up putting his his trophy wife in a in a box in a um change like a like a victim uh he played handle really manipulating the language in a way that that sounds very much like what we see now here and now so um if you have done really for for decades half a century both together a century of work does it work is theater in the way you do you write a play at home i think at a computer or your typewriter or most probably computer writing and then you rehearse it and you play the audience come what is your experience what have you learned what have we learned uh somebody wrote me today on facebook because i had noted that we were going to do this talk and and she said uh everybody who's ever seen or read your play has never forgotten the experience um and i was very moved by that i i have heard from people 20 years later that they never forgot the play that they saw um that said we have a very small audience uh because of economic censorship um the kind of plays that are allowed in this country are not the kind of plays we normally do or ever do perhaps and we're heavily economically censored and sometimes critically censored and sometimes outright censored you know um where we're told it's too our plays are too uh too provocative to ever be produced at x theater even though it's a brilliant play we've been told that it's a brilliant play but i can't do it artistic director artistic director yes so it's too risky so there is a great deal of censorship in the american theater um uh and that you know as there is an american life and much of it comes down to the way we fund things the way we fund everything so that health care is censored and theater is censored um so both things are true we've learned that we have an enormous impact the plays really speak to people they stick with people for in in the flesh um which is what i think art does art should get inside you and art should show that you can change it works its way inside you and suddenly you feel differently than you felt 10 minutes ago before you saw and you're breathing together with an audience much is said about this so you're in community but you're also changing in your own private specific way so we know our work has this kind of impact um but we also struggle to uh reach audiences what have we learned about art we try to make it better each time each time we do it well we i think i think what we do is we try to challenge ourselves uh into another level uh of for for instance that the last play that we just did at lamama uh is a first science fiction play that carons have ever written and uh it takes place in the future and and and it's it was fantastic uh uh and and it was totally new a new form uh and a new a new way of writing for her and that that's one of the marvelous things that that's it she's able to do she's able to create a world and a language for that world and a whole uh um you know ethos for for that world and mythology and so on so that uh it's a very complete kind of experience we've also been lucky uh in our collaborators um salient parson's who has done our costumes since we started and tony givinetti who's done our lighting since we started arthur rosen who's our composer who's writing a score for the new play which george will talk about the other new play choreo two and blue valiant but these are people who we've worked with for for years and and who are we're so in sync that we we hardly ever have to talk i mean we we communicate in a kind of subliminal way so that uh george had to turn into an owl and other than we and salient had to make this costume which would be an all all vista costume change from a gnome chomsky as character who's a friend of our theater and a personal friend of ours um in in from from that character into an owl in front of the audience and she had no idea how she was going to do this nor did we until about a week before we opened we had a very short uh tech a day and a half for for tech something like that um but you know the the trust that she would come through that tony would do the the perfect lighting uh these this kind of these kind of collaborative um and that arthur would write the the music that we needed this this collaborative um we call our theater theater three collaborative cathleen chaffon is another person we've worked with a lot and will i wrote blue valiant the the other new play for her and for george i i love to write for actors i know especially when they're brilliant actors like those two and i crafted the character of hannah doile for kathy so i really built it on what i knew about her she had been in my play prophecy she was in uh the documentary i did about the invasion of iraq she was in uh dinner during yemen at the signature so we've worked together you know for for a decade to george and and george and kathy love to act together so this is a great pleasure there are three people in this play and a horse the third the third person is a is a child an immigrant child who's escaped from a detention center um and then the horse uh who will be played by a musical score i turn it over to you i don't know what else i can say now but it's it it's a very unusual play also but because again it's it's in a totally different universe and it's and it's the first play that karen's uh written that's it's seemingly completely realistic and in in real time the play seems to go from one scene to the other just in one span uh uh and uh it's quite marvelous uh so and at the end of uh uh at the end of also it's it's very very it's very unusual i can't i can't really describe how the ending works but it does it's it's it's a different kind of ending totally uh but totally in keeping with the style of the play and and and uh and it's all about uh really healing uh the healing of an animal that is as complex as any human and uh the the same issues of healing and trauma and and and what does it mean uh really to try to heal uh an animal that you know you cannot communicate with how to communicate with an animal uh it's it's it's extraordinary so uh we're very excited about that and we're going to do blue valley and we're going to do it we're going to do it outdoors at a rescue farm for animals for for for horses in particular no it's actually this is an eco farm what we're going to do we hope to do it at a rescue farm but the first date we have is at farm arts collective in pennsylvania in may we'll do it outside in may but i've written a lot about animals actually i i grew up on horses uh i was a horse woman um and would like to be again someday um uh and i ride whenever i get a chance to ride um but the second play we ever did together uh was a play called better people which was about genetic engineering it's kind of mad satire on uh genetic engineering and in it a very rare beast walks into george's lab and swallows him um the beast says one word and this was a puppet made by basil twist it was one of basil twist first uh new york new york gigs um this beautiful big yak anyway uh who has speaks one word rendezvous um and the anyway there's that play and then of course extreme weather a frog sniffly is is one of the central characters in extreme weather and in blue valiant the horse blue valiant is a central character blue valiant i wrote before the pandemic um but it's a play about grief and healing and healing from grief so in a way it sits uh strangely in this this moment has been a play that you know speaks to so many people unfortunately as as we grieve the loss of so many people we knew and and uh don't know but know are being lost um yeah so so this this uh you don't think of theater necessarily as a place for animals but indeed indeed we are also animals and and in and in other than we george turns into an owl and the the creatures who are created in other than we the futuristic play who have their most importantly have their heads connected to their hearts which i think is something we need to redo so we have this connection so we can't act without feeling what we're doing and we can't feel without thinking about what we're feeling this this connection um the the the notion of other than we is that empathy which is an evolutionary trait learned by hunters and gatherers passing around babies because everybody had to be held and passed and cared for that that empathy can disappear because it is an evolutionary trait right and this notion struck me powerfully if empathy can disappear which i think it might be doing in our current world then we have to reinvent empathy we have to re-op our commitment to this head-heart connection and this way too so we're connected that way to others as well yeah many many artists also we talk to and see the talks uh um tell us about the importance we have to pay to the world of animals the world of plants this human-centric world has come to an end not only are we threatened as a species now and just as a mind game if there's no vaccine for this virus you know we might not survive mankind might not survive and there is these box out like rickium forest species those has never been as serious as it is now and if global temperatures go up as we all know you are in a hospital and you have a high fever one degree more will kill the patient the same will be with the earth so the idea to put plants the critical zone that 30 feet above us and below us into the center is of significance especially animals yes yes absolutely yes that's probably what other than we uh is about uh because it's uh it's about a a inventing a new creature that is wiser and smarter than we are so we're it's not dominated by fear the way we are uh and so uh you know that's one of the wonderful things about uh other than we it always has some kind of central theme uh it has a way of taking the central theme and the story and and putting them together so that they're one experience of that idea that's it's very good yeah so um tell us a bit about the way you work also traumaturgically we're going to have next week we have we talk about theater of the real uh documentary theater now American with us you work as writers and with some music and with set design costumes so let's say you have a theme like animals so how does how do you guys as artists so when do you say this is a good story this is how we work um this is how we think in our world you know we we make decisions what is important when do you know what what to put on the stage Karen I think mostly uh invents uh the the initial uh idea the initial uh and then and then she spends a lot of time working out the story the plot uh uh and that takes a long time so uh uh and then and so finally and then finally she lets me uh uh perhaps read the play and that's when the fireworks start between us because there are we usually at 3 am we're we're talking about uh you know hey wait a minute uh you're not gonna do that are you you know in the middle of that scene you know and and so we start uh arguing you know from then on and and uh that that's one of the things that made the Clemper such an incredible experience because we took the diaries and we had to if you know the diaries there I think the most incredible diaries of the 20th century they it's like war war and peace uh you know uh because it has so many stories that you want to keep and you can't and if it hadn't been uh if I hadn't been working with Karen uh you know she would have allowed and she would not have allowed me she didn't allow me actually to to keep some of the stories that I wanted which I thought were brilliant they were brilliant but you can't you can't keep everything you have to know how to edit so that you really uh keep the power of what you're trying to do so I can be a little bit specific about certain plays I read a tremendous amount I'm I'm a I was trained not to write plays but to read plays my earliest loves were Yeats and Augusta Gregory and that that combination two people who made a theater that changed the life of Ireland quite literally right um to a poet a poet and a woman who who became a playwright at the age of 50 and wrote 50 plays before she died so anyway I grew up reading and I I'm a reader I'm a great reader and I read a lot and I research a lot so every play has enormous amount of research before I start to write it uh with the Clemper for instance I was researching something else and I read the Clemper diaries and a little voice came into my head and said why don't you do something nice for George show him these diaries and suggest that we make a one man show out of two volumes out of 600 pages of of diary right and so we said about for several years editing this diary and we did not want to change a single word of the Clemper he's a brilliant writer and editing his diaries was also a great writing workshop for me so we edited and edited and edited down to two different one man shows which we toured from George toured for four years in Europe um so that was one uh one thing um then you know uh um just say try two for instance the new the newest play I was reading Euripides uh when the pandemic started because he's my favorite of the Greek playwrights although I love all the Greek playwrights and I read them and teach them also obsessively um and I'm very interested in theater as healing as were the Greeks and theater as a way of increasing democracy as were the Greeks and theater as a way of dealing with trauma uh Euripides is the angriest and the most pacifist of the three playwrights and I was reading the church and women kind of over and over again and um and then the idea of Troy too to oh oh Troy also came into my mind as the city as our city went into the heightened the April uh height of the pandemic uh when it was very frightening and um yeah very frightening and then of course on top of that came Black Lives Matter and and the climate crisis I teach environmental justice as well as theater and I'm uh since uh since the play Extreme Weather I've been sort of known in that world as as an environmental writer um uh so uh so you know you you're you're reading and then something clicks something something about now something a personal but also historical and those three things come together what you what you've studied what you've read what you love uh what is happening in the world and then some personal connection and when those three things come together then I have a story then I then I begin to invent the story you don't have the story doesn't fall under your head it's it's trial and error um uh writing is rewriting and I do a tremendous amount of rewriting usually sometimes things come perfectly but how long does it take from idea first child finished child so how long do you work it's totally different with every play it's completely different with every play I mean in a way we're always working because once I show the script to George and he says I don't understand this at all what's going on here and then we work our way into it I mean he comes from I come from within it and he comes from outside it and at a certain point we meet where we're both working with something that's outside of both of us which is the creation of the of the of the actual production um I'm so so so fortunate in in my collaborations and especially the closest one is with George and some of the others I've mentioned um and there are others that I could but I I uh I am uh extraordinarily fortunate as a playwright to have people who Beatrice Shuller who takes the photographs of all of our plays another great collaborator who just comes in you never speak to her she takes the photos and she gets every moment you know that you want Kristen Clifford who worked with was a student of mine at NYU and has been in a number of our our plays Najil Said I mean there there are people who come and and go and Tommy Tommy J. Moore and Emily Emily Daley who were just in other than we are people we will work with again that we did the zoom production with them so we try to make a commitment uh to our collaborators and and the the longer you work with people the more they put in you know the more you so uh what become what it starts is a very private uh really non-verbal moment when something moves in me that can be a play then becomes over over time and sometimes it takes two years sometimes it takes three years sometimes it takes lesser time um than that we have many um many listeners also they are students writers actors directors but also writers um from your really big experience can tell of something where you feel this worked well and this did not work well what do you do you have a little do you have do you know something and you um or is it new every what worked well and what doesn't work well and I'm not sure what you're asking um in your in your work we say yes the audience got it I mean I understand from you that you said you know this is actually they do understand and they feel something and they make connections in their minds like in a good friendship play but but still we all have works sometimes this was more that was so it's good to know what what what did you you know from from your experience are there twice you can give what people say yeah I think you know this is now a time they're seated in the political sense was a clear message somehow but still broad enough to capture the mystery of the universe but think about this when you do this when you start out what do I what I'm sorry think about something like this so that's you know something we learned or what we I mean I I try to think about what needs to be written about now you know we're at this very moment for you to use Troy to as an example just because it's it's in my mind we want to put it we want to make it alive and also YouTube and animated some kind of multimedia uh production because theater right now as you know is difficult to do inside a theater space um uh so um you know one one wanted to write about you know in in this case the climate crisis the pandemic and black lives matter and how they come together in this moment when our uh Troy to our our uh city-state our police our our demos are is threatened is threatened um it's threatened from within as it turns out you know not not from without we're the most powerful country in the history of the world right nobody's going to you know take us out we can we're going to take ourselves out um and and this is the moment that we're in and I think both uh also uh other than we both those plays are really aware of that but that this is a dangerous moment we need a leap of consciousness uh and that leap of consciousness is we are sentient creatures on a sentient planet and we're not here to control we're not here to dominate we're here to protect to support to lift up to nurture to care for this fragile planet and the fragile beings all of us fragile now and the pandemic has shown us that and of course there will be more pandemics if we don't uh address the way we are rampaging through nature right it's not just this this pandemic there will be more as nomchansky said recently this one is highly contagious but not highly lethal although it's killing way too many people in this country right but we could get a highly contagious and highly lethal next virus next iteration of this and everybody's saying this I mean every health infectious disease person I'm you know I kind of excessively read and follow um the news of the day and the news of the day right now is is is infectious disease news uh among other uh things um you know so so uh one has to try to make a piece of work that will speak to what's needed now and also what's where we could go and how we can transform ourselves not the bickering of the so much of the american theater bicker bicker bicker bicker no no no no people fight in my plays obviously but but the but the the thrust is towards towards transformation towards change uh towards uh deepening understanding of a of a fragile place in the inner fragile universe um very well said so yeah I think you know uh the the need for a real transformation uh uh emotionally and intellectually towards a living uh planet towards the relationship that we have that we are a part of not that we are separate or better or anything like that at all and we have to accept that mutual reciprocity that's what we need and the other thing I would say too is beauty um of language I mean I'm I'm a great I love language um and I love acting and I find nothing more beautiful when than when a beautiful actor a physical actor an actor who's been George is a classically trained Shakespeare actor from Rodop no less other you know aside from his political training he has as I do we have very classical theater trainings and if we're asking for advice for young people I would say both you know you have to read the classics and read and reread you have to find what you love and read and reread what you love not just once but you carry these things with you forever you you drop more deeply into each time you read a play that you love each time I read The Trojan Women for instance I discover oh my god I never saw that you know it becomes more part of me and I carry these plays through my life so as I change I come back to the great literature that I love and I find new things in it so the classical tradition George with Shakespeare he's not about Shakespeare the way I am about the Greeks and we go back and forth with this he's classically trained but he's also from the avant garde he's also a movement person a dance person from the Judson poets theater which we haven't mentioned yet and theater for the new city which he co-founded so these two these two seemingly disparate traditions the classical tradition and the avant garde tradition political tradition actually go together and I think that's true and even you know in any playwright jeanet a playwright I love very much you know has those two the classical and the and the political vision you know so that that would be my advice is read and the other and the other advice I would have is find somebody who's doing work that you love and throw yourself at their feet as we did you know as I did with the open theater as George did you know apprentice uh as George did with the living theater and then I did also with the living theater don't become them don't join them apprentice and then you go and do your own work yeah and uh as Judith said Judith Molina said to me once you know people either stay as your acolytes or they become your equals and your friends and your you know artistic friends and you do that by kind of giving yourself to whether it's the abbey theater and my imagination Yates and Augusta Gregory or the living theater actually rehearsing with them and doing you know all kinds of things with them and then you become your own your your own thing which is something unlike what your mentors did but it totally informed by them so you transform yourself actually but you can't transform yourself unless you love the giving over to something someone outside of yourself ideas bigger than you and that's true in the political world and it's true in the climate as we try to love the world love the world more than we've ever loved the world in order to save the world right you the giving of yourself over to something larger than you are changes you and allows you to do the next work become the new again new and new enough to do something new yeah I mean for for years you know I was an acolyte of different theater famous people like Andre Gregory Jerome Robbins Elia Kazan I worked with all those people and each one taught me something and it was a wonderful experience but you know I was never satisfied because they never put together a movement and ideas and they didn't know how to do that because they didn't have a real appreciation of language and poetry and I was mad about poetry and I was always looking for a more poetic theater somewhere that was also maybe political you know and of course that's one of the hardest things to find you know and it was a sheer moment when I had almost given up finding such a thing when Judith Molina walked in with Karen and her new play and it was Judith's return to America and she wanted to have two two American actors do this play which where two people play six roles is amazing just amazing piece and I right away when I started to read it I said what what wait a minute what is this and I was so thrilled to find this imagist and also very physical theater that that used language to put you into a situation right away just to leap into the situation with the language and it was it was amazing and for me the thrill how we fell in love for me the thrill of watching this actor physicalize my language so there is there there's a lot of nature in us there's always a lot of nature in all of my plays but there there's a horse scene in which George as the character actually became this horse and there's another scene that takes place under water in the sea with the sea creatures swimming around a young boy it's his memory which which George also did it's it's two actors who play themselves and their parents as lovers and it's ethnically conflict with it in each pair and he also plays his mother and he plays you know so there's a lot of gender switching the female actor plays her father beating beating her mother as a matter of fact he plays his mother in a very narcissistic scene where he dresses in a he dressed in this long slinky dress and put on makeup and yeah so so these these and Judith staged this play on a set that was 60 feet long 30 feet high and two feet wide so the actors were always on an edge as they were running up and down and doing all these these things um yeah yeah so it's that mixture of the physical and the and the and the poetic and the intellectual um the idea because a play without an idea is really a bore also or many ideas for that matter so but you mentioned sometimes who who in the contemporary american theater who who who do you look up to who do you connect to where do you feel you said clearly in a way also you know we don't get this the support we should that we are being censored economical censorship the risk taking isn't there they also it's not the subsidies like in europe but um so where do you fit in in this scene do you have context to a broadway world to the nonprofit which our profit how does it all work for such a small company and and how do you feel it doesn't it's impossible it's impossible um uh i as i said it works because we have people who we work with who love our work who we love and we just do it you know um and now with chore to avra in in um uh uh uh athens and cypress in greece um we'll have an international collaboration yet in nezerich um who's a wonderful player at in kosovo where we rehearsed uh another life at at the national theater when yetton was the um uh artistic director of the national theater so there's a lot of international Naomi Wallace is a dear friend of mine a great playwright um we support each other's work um she's mainly based in england but she's an american um kathy shelfant is you know my great collaborator with george uh so that yes uh there are other people's theaters um who you know i admire yetton Naomi have in contact and our poetic our language writers and idea writers and political writers both both those two um i'm just talking about close friends at the moment yeah so it's still not not easy to survive and to make work so it's quite you're quite uh successful as uh who can't bring it and to our role model i think you know say yeah well they did it you know karen and george well you know this one always says just keep going i'm much more hysterical he's i i will i will give up but he will not give up and and i think that's fine someone or someone's who you can work with who really whose work you love uh who you admire as a human being um and this is true of all the people we work with they're incredible uh artists and thinkers and and and um we sustain we sustain each other in this funny little bumpy way that we're going to do a blue valiant on a farm um of a lovely woman who does wonderful theater whose name is tannis it's it's um farm arts collective and that came to us because of selly persons are our costume designer who knows tannis and and tannis knows my work and i know who works so this is again another very different work very but work that we admire and and want to support and now she will give us her let us work on her farm where she also does her her performances um again avra found me uh because she asked around in europe uh if there were any american playwrights and a couple of people uh who knew my book um plays in time which was published by intellect which is an english publisher uh suggested me so so there's a kind of international web of of artists who uh whose work we had we admire we did when we took extreme weather to paris we we co-produced it with with a swiss um french uh company and worked with french and and swiss french actors in english and in french um and that was another wonderful international collaboration um so there are people around the world who who we work with and people in new york uh who we work with um katie davis who teaches at the university of oklahoma at oklahoma it's not it's not the university but it's a it's a liberal arts college in oklahoma who sent us a wonderful young woman uh emma rose kraus who was in extreme weather um and and she katie did a version of extreme weather in oklahoma um and she's a great friend of our work i mean they're they're you know i could go on and on but um you know these these uh connections are very precious nina camberos who publishes uh uh laertes books and publishes the acting editions of my plays and yetton's plays and uh will publish an anthology that contains our work and other people's work she is finding amazing playwrights from around the world i'm at this point i'm the only american playwright in her on her list um but wonderful wonderful playwrights from everywhere else and uh so there's an international um uh connections that that feel very real and and perhaps are very good at this time when this country is so isolated from the rest of the world right uh in policy we're against the world health organization we're pulling out of the paris climate agreement today as a matter of fact um uh and yet we as artists are reaching out around the world to other artists and and having more and more of international collaborations george if i may ask how old were you as a boy when you were flat nazi germany with your family six i was six i was six when when my brother and i left maybe tell us about the moment and then also does that inform you is that the reason why you do theater is that i don't know i think it informs everything that i do uh my parents were both dancers they had a company in uh berlin and they toured around germany uh in the 20s and uh then they finally got a bad review in the nazi press and my mother said you know what i think it's time to go uh and my father didn't want to go because he said oh well but but but uh we're in the culture they're not going to bother me because he was russian jewish and uh my mother said oh no oh no not this time this is different and and uh you know so uh they came to america first to see if they could make a living and then they sent for us finally uh uh in 38 and 39 we got out in 39 uh so yes uh that experience there definitely uh stayed with me forever and when i when i was in high school the macarthur hearings just shocked me out of my mind i couldn't believe that such a thing was possible in america uh that this one character uh suddenly had uh you know taken over the seem to take over the the congress and the senate and so on so forth in this obviously uh uh really horrible way that he was uh you know getting people to commit suicide and and and you know lose their jobs and so on so forth and i just thought my god it can happen here uh you know and one thing and another and then i was uh after i was in judson i you know judson was just pure poetry and and a liberation for me because there suddenly i could put the language together with a movement and the style of those plays which were very free and open and uh then you know i decided well you know let's start a theater of our own and stop complaining uh you know let's just to do what we want and and of course in the beginning you know there were so many poets and so many playwrights so many people who had something important to say everybody wanted to had something important to say and that we came from that tradition both of us we worked with those people we were attracted to those people they made our lives meaningful and suddenly we we had a direction but it didn't come you know like it wasn't like one door opened and it was we were in it took a number of experiences i mean with uh uh Jerome Robbins for instance and so on who wanted to form a poetic dance theater and i thought oh this is it i finally found the person that i want to work with forever and be in his company you know and then it turned out he didn't have an ear for language and so you know it the whole thing collapsed and that really upset me because that was the hope that i had had to find this theater where i could make a synthesis you know of two things that would make theater more meaningful more exciting uh and uh you know i want to use both what my i got from my parents in the way of movement and and dance and and also you know what i what i loved about the same year i was in the in the Broadway show i went back to Piscata's and and and was in played bottom and mid summer night stream and i just think you know and you know when we you know so that was it i had to put the two things together and find somebody who could do it and if i didn't if i couldn't find somebody you know finally it was sheer desperation let's do it ourselves you know and the early zoo story right by obi and oh well that was another great experience because of this becket and and i got to play it back to back in the same night uh you know for six months craps last tape craps last tape and the zoo story which is really it was incredible yeah so becket has been also a big influence becket is i just wanted to talk about economics for a minute because when we start and it'll be interesting to see what happens to the city post pandemic when we started out you didn't need money to do theater and nobody thought about money so the open theater wasn't thinking about money then they started to get grants and then they disbanded right right at that moment but my first play a lament for three women was done with with uh open theater actors uh who joe put me in touch with and we did it in sable sable hang soho loft at that time soho was not soho as it became it was a grungy place where artists had big lofts and we did it in natural light so that it started it it ended just as the sun set into the river and so that lighting that came through the window gave this incredible lighting effect for the for the play and so money was not an issue and indeed we've remained a poor theater as gritosky would or peter schumann another friend of ours bread and puppet um we we've all remained uh poor and and there's a virtue to that and somebody was talking today about all the money that was spent on this election much of it just thrown away you know and um you know it didn't produce the results that the money especially people thought it would produce um too much money is is not so good for art money for actors money for money for people to live on we have always paid not enough but we always pay the people we work with we never expect anybody to work with us for free ever um that is a mark of of respect for the artist but we never spend a lot of money on productions never and because sallie and parson's owns a major costume shop she can make all of her costumes and she does and she she's the president of our board etc so she she contributes to the theater with with her her broadway the broadway work that she does but but for you know the idea of not wasting money but investing in in language and in in people and in idea and emotion you know we don't need all this fancy stuff on the stage it gets it it obscures you know yes that said of course give us money we'd love to have more money you know i think you could stay so much longer or just want to be alone but i think it was a good it was wonderful to have you both together so so at the moment um what inspires you what do you what what do you read or what do you listen to what do you watch so be honest we really want to know uh you know we had a j what inspires us this whole time you want something else we've been reading out loud since the pandemic started at night so we're sitting in the evening you sit on your living room and you read to each other in the living room and we read um we started with camo we read the plague and the stranger re re re reading then i introduced george to a wonderful to us you read loud you read loud you read we read loud uh we read yes read a lot we read i love oh it's much better then we read two hours it's an hour or how long is the session when caron and george we feel like reading we will stop and talk or we'll you know yeah however long um we read so we read two camo then we read Ursula McGuinn um uh her two great novels the dispossessed and what's the other one the left left side of day i have i can pull it off my shelf but the great ice story both both fantastic novels she's a she's a she's somebody i devoured all of her left hand of darkness left hand of darkness i devoured all of her work uh as i was uh preparing to write other than we and as i also read all of gnome chomsky's linguistics which i've been reading on and off since the 70s when i first discovered gnome but he had published several new books uh so you know one is inspired by you know by by what one reads right now we're reading hardy we read jude and we're reading tests um but also i've been reading obsessively about health and prevention everything i could get my hand on hands on about the pandemic how it started um what the virus is and also about prevention which you know there hasn't been enough talk about um vitamin d vita the vita building up your own immune system because this is you know there's no focus on prevention and western medicine which is criminal um you know they go in and they nuke you they nuke you better than anyone you know they're really good at nuking but they're not good at prevention and then they're not good at healing after they've nuked you so after they've nuked you you have to heal yourself right so this this and of course we people don't eat well in this country um you know i'm i we're lucky yet to live i'm a member of the parks of food cops so we eat very well we organic food um but most people don't have that luxury it's too expensive you know that blah blah blah um so you know what am i reading and then i love to teach Baldwin uh blues for mr charlie i'm teaching uh um theater and justice at john j college so of course i'm rereading blues for mr charlie for the 50th time as i teach it and i do a lot of rereading um i Baldwin is one of my favorite writers um uh so uh yes we read moby dick out loud yeah we read moby dick out loud that's fantastic before we went to the paris uh climate conference with it with extreme weather we read moby dick out loud um rather yeah about the superficial world right what he calls when you walk on the earth superficial the ocean yeah yeah incredible and music wise or listening or films or uh i mean you know we haven't been watching so many films uh except what we we did watch alex givney's documentary um totally totally under control about the pandemic the one that just came out which is really worth seeing it's about the chicago seven no no we watched the chicago seven too we watched alan sarkin's new new film the chicago seven and then we watched alex givney's totally under control those are the last two films and then dr strangelove was on channel 13 a couple weeks ago again um yeah yeah yeah this is good so you know it's a good reminder you guys who's saying you know react as every good actor react to the scene you're in you know so if you're right or you know see what's happening around you but look back over thousands of years have a dialogue with the classics but creating something new that could be and also look outside of this country because of course you know one of the pleasures that i that i've had as a playwright because i had written about the invasions of iraq and and i have been invited a number of times to the theater festival in egypt is to meet people from the middle east uh and to meet refugees when i wrote uh the beekeeper's daughter which is about a bosnian refugee i met lots of bosnian refugees some of whom became very close friends lifelong heart friends um this country does things to other countries you know and you know we we both of us grew up in the vietnam war which was you know a shock and a terror and a nightmare daily and then the assassinations um and you know now we are you know we're still in that uh moment um where we're hurting other people and and if you reach out to the people who we've hurt you you find extraordinary human veins and extraordinary stories and your world uh becomes larger and and uh and people need to know that americans care you know and we reach out we have to also read the stories from themselves from the americans from people from africa asia australia anymore when we listen to this story and combine it so talking about hurting others or not and the uncertainty maybe we ask any is there any update because we have been talking about and you know is there any update you didn't interrupt us so give us a little idea before we close it down absolutely just a small update from about 10 minutes ago so they have not officially called wisconsin however 99% of the votes are now in and biden is in the lead by 20 000 votes so they're only on about 300 left from the small county but the trump campaign has already said that they're going to um request an immediate recount so if biden is having a lucky constellation of the stars at the moment beth malone who's a marvelous actress who was in um uh home what is the what is the name other than we you know she was she just did a reading with of us with other than we but she's known for a Broadway show and the name is totally flown on uh but it's very famous and I know it forgive me anyway uh beth uh who we just got to work with because of the pandemic because we could never have afforded her without the pandemic but she was the zoom of other than we had a great time she was part of uh flip wisconsin which was a very grassroots organization to flip wisconsin which i joined with her um and donated to it's one of the you know um and i'm glad to see it's working and we're flipping wisconsin because i also went to the university of wisconsin so i know i know so it's the fact you know what we do and even in theater you know i often think of it of a homeopathic pill that is chosen you know by the artist doctors you know to almost invisible but it is inserted and perhaps you know there's something it does and by observing by looking by creating um um publics and sit around in a circle you know we also change but by the very very very fact of it we're going to continue our talks tomorrow maybe we know more tomorrow we know who the president is or not uh or not on friday tomorrow we have simon um uh from uh from the great cc art sling he took over from the legendary fritzy brown and he has many new artists he brings to the country does exactly what you guys say we need to be in dialogue we need to be together something we had to see to also try very much to do and and so also he does his zoom talk also one we were interested in the idea of radical hosting hosting people what you also said you know so artists are working on that that will be of interest in this kind of socially politically engaged art what we have then we have the great susan feldmann by the end of the week on friday should we talk about saint ann and you know how she got there what is happening there now what is going through her mind you know now finally she had the great space opened not so long ago and now it's you know it costs less to build that as far as we know ps1 or ps community you know so incredible so what is happening and so thank you all for listening thanks to hull round for having us back and what an incredible time this is a historic day so you guys are part of it andy thank you for giving us an update as a newscaster as a new career for you and to our listeners really thank you for spending time with us and it's important to listen what these artists say engage with history engage with the moment listen to people engage with people make up your own ideas your own company which also means make up your own mind you know engage don't don't just follow others but if you do follow them as a follow-up but then you know you also transform it and you create something that makes gives meaning to you and then others because new generations will have to put everything together new but karen and george did a fantastic work i think in their lives their engagement with theater and the arts has been profound it has been influential it stands up as one of the many possibilities of theater han stisleman says theater is a house it has many rooms in one of the rooms karen and george lived there's a great contribution they made because they also the three collaborative companies so this is something to really take serious and it's important and it's a great contribution towards civilization and towards you know the advancement of the idea of mankind and towards justice and freedom so um thank you you know and congratulations on what you what you did and it's important for us to hear it to hear it again you all know it but um in these times where things are on the line as we see now where votes do count as in the kamu play we did yesterday with other nasturias and today so it does matter in the political but how to do it how does work with us is great questions and we have now even better questions we don't give really answers or explanation that we explore so this was a great great moment thank you all and i hope you will join us again this week stay safe and thank you so much thank you thank you thank you and bye bye and thanks ti and we