 And it's another grayish, a little bit slightly cold day in Manhattan, in Midtown. And we are marching on with our series. It's this edition number 147. And we are continuing our talks through the time of Corona. And now we are slowly, hopefully, leaving it. We entered it in March last year, spoke to so many artists from all around the world. And we get an update on what's on their minds, what theater means to them, and how theater helped them to create meaning in life and how it helped us also through their work. And we have a very special day-to-day, I think, for everybody who followed our talks, knows that we have put a strong focus on great theater artists from around the world, from the US, but also on the idea of the theater of the real and also on theater artists who have a long experience who can look back over decades. And luckily today, we have with us Emily Mann, who is all of that. And she's a great, great worker in the field of theater, has influenced so many lives, has really created an outstanding body of work. And with us to honor it in a right way, we have Carol Martin, who all our listeners know so very well. And Carol is with us again, she is the one who mapped that field, the theater of the real and out. And so we will be all three of us in conversation. Carol will give a little introduction for all of those who do not know enough about Emily Mann. We also have many international listeners. There would be no need to introduce her here in the US, but for our international listeners, Emily is an award-winning playwright and director and an artistic director. And she's served for 30 years, three decades as the artistic director and resident playwright of the MacArthur Theater, the great MacArthur Theater in Princeton in New Jersey, just an hour away from Midtown Manhattan, if you don't get the rights up into Brooklyn and the train stop, it might take you the same time and to get to the MacArthur Theater. And I have done it often and she has won so many awards, Tonys. And she has also made a very, very significant production on Broadway, often, you know, it is very hard to have your own work experimental work and also be representative on Broadway and to get away with it. And she really did that. This is the streetcar named Desire, the famous and significant Anna in the tropics that she developed in Hilo Kuspy that got also the Pulitzer execution of justice having our say. And so many, many others, Greensboro, Mr. Packard and I cannot tell them all scenes from a marriage until Vanya, the cherry orchard, a seagull in the Hamptons, the house of Bernada Alba was a very successful production, Antigone and so many, many, many other things. She got her Tonys, but also she is included in the American theater hall of fame is a very big deal, it's very important but her heart, I think, is with the theater. We all care about and this is quite an achievement to be able to move in all these worlds. Carol, as you all know, is a professor of drama at Tisch School of the Arts and affiliated with, of course, NYU and Abu Dhabi, the little, how would one say, downtown Whitney, downtown NYU in Abu Dhabi. She is an expert on the theater of the real and the dramaturgy of the real on the world stages. That's how great a book is about and she really writes about French theater, Israeli theater, Japanese theater and her book series in performance from the seagull book is something we really should all follow even more in French, I mean, translated in French. I'm sure she also follows a French theater. She guest edits for the great TDR, the important magazine and she just wrote something about Toshiki Okada, the great Japanese director she supported early on and understood his significant contribution to global theater and so she's also got some numerous fellowships and she's a speaker around the world. So it's a big, big honor to have her with us here and now again I talked way too much and let's go to our guests and first of all, Emily, where are you and what time is it? Well, it is noon in Princeton, New Jersey. So I'm still in Princeton though, I stepped down from MacArthur a year ago, July 1st of this past year. My goodness, this must have been incredible. 30 year work, which is a big change in life. So you're losing a part of your life, your work, your place being set in such a, and then Corona comes in. Yes, it was a very strange confluence and wonderful actually in that I spent the last five months from March until July, running the theater via Zoom and from home. And so it helped me break the 30 year habit of grabbing a cup of coffee, jumping in my car and driving to the theater until dinner or midnight, whatever was going on. So it helped me make the transition in a strange way to being, working from home again and being a freelance artist again, which I'm ending up adoring. And I've had, I feel almost guilty to say it because I'm also so aware of my good fortune and luck with all the misery that this year has caused for me. It was the most creative one of my life and decades. Really? Tell us a bit about the moment when Corona happened. Where were you? What were you doing? Well, I was actually a bit clueless, unconscious. I had taken a group of major donors from the MacArthur Theater to London, as I often did to see plays and to talk about them. And we were in London last week of February, first few days of March, hearing something about this mysterious virus, not realizing how serious it was in a theater, often a large theater every night. And we got home, found out how serious this was. And within 10 days of returning, we had to close MacArthur, as did all the American theaters, Broadway and the rest of the theaters around the country had to shutter by I think about March 16th. So we dodged many bullets while we were there. As a matter of fact, I told you earlier that we had seen Tom Stoppard's new play, which we very much admired. And then Tom was in the audience behind us, watching a play the next night. And a friend of mine who had worked with him said, he got it, as did most of that cast. So we were extremely fortunate. We were lucky and I'm sure the board of the MacArthur was very nervous when they heard you took all the donors to London in the time of Corona. What were you thinking in March? Incredible, but that's a miraculous and it was... Miraculous, that was of theater with us. They should be. So Carol, you are surveying the theater scene from your work as a researcher, as a writer, also as a lover of theater. Where does Emily fit in? Why are you interested in her work? Well, Emily fits in many places. Many different kinds of places from off-Broadway to Broadway to, she's clearly both a director and a playwright. And I first was introduced to Emily's work in relationship to the idea of documentary theater. And her incredible book, Testimonies Foreplace by Emily Mann, which I'll hold up here. And the kind of track record that Emily, that you have, Emily, from the early play Anula Allen, which I saw off-Broadway a while ago, actually written in 1977 or first produced in 77. Title is The Autobiography of the Survivor and it's about a Holocaust survivor. And I think this play really anticipated an explosion of documentary theater in the US in very different kinds of forms. And also Still Life, which is 1979 about the Vietnam War's impact on domestic lives. And in this particular play, Emily interviewed a Vietnam War vet, his wife and his girlfriend. And it's really a, and it's a graphic play, I would say, about the domestic violence that ensues from veterans bringing the war back home. It's very moving. It's very challenging in terms of its domestic violence. And then there are these execution of justice, which looks at the murder of Harvey Melk, who was the first openly gay person elected to the Board of Supervisors in San Francisco. And it's an incredible play, but also kind of my favorite play that Emily has written of this kind of work is Greensboro-Eurekriana, 1995. And it's about the murder of five anti-couplex clan demonstrators during a march in North Carolina. So the Klansmen and Neo-Nazis were brought to trial three times and Emily really documents what happened over those three trials. And in one sense, Emily builds her own complex case that who these people are and what they believe in is the actual situational kind of social political context of the murders. And portrays a part of a portion of a certain American sensibility. It's actually still post civil war. It's strangely not what we imagine the country to be in certain ways. So it's an extraordinary body of work. And it's a body of work that pulls a mirror up to nature. It holds a mirror up to ourselves in terms of lets us see ourselves from a new vantage point through these four very different kinds of situations in American history. So that's how I first got introduced and interested in Emily's work. Yeah. Thank you, Carol. I love that Greensboro is your favorite play because it's my most forgotten child. It has never had the kind of life that the others have, perhaps because it premiered in Princeton and then it didn't go on and it's a large cast. Now it has a great life again because it's so much about white supremacy and that's what people are discussing. And so there've been many community readings both in Greensboro where it happened and TBS followed that. And then on college campuses or in community groups people will sit around and they read it which has made another life for it which gives me great, great happiness. Yeah. How do you tie, is there any way that you're thinking about some of the issues in Greensboro to more contemporary events, the demonstrations that we all experienced last summer, the project? No question about it. The rise of neonatism and the white supremacist movements. Some are no longer called clan, KKK. There are lots of different names of it but the rise of white supremacist movements was sort of enabled and encouraged and by the last presidential reign. And as the Southern Poverty Law Center said there has been a huge spike in hate crimes and racist anti-Semitic and anti-black and anti-immigrant crimes. And so the play, Greensboro was talking about another time when that surge was happening in the late seventies where the clan was getting larger and larger again. And the point is, as you made earlier it's the ethos of American culture that never quite came to terms with the end of the loss in the Civil War. And that culture still pervades in different forms and whether it was shown again during Jim Crow, we know that's true. There was a little seeming low but it was still just silenced. And now we're, as some people are saying, in Jim Crow 2.0. So there's a lot of what's happening at this moment in time in our country that Greensboro talks about both the history of it and the present. Yeah. One of the things that is so admirable in Greensboro particular, but in all the plays is that you're not afraid to include and interview the, quote unquote, the other side. So for Greensboro, remarkably, you interviewed David Duke who was the former grand dragon of the clan, former president of the National Association for the Advancement of White People and included his thoughts, but also they're in the third trial that's represented in the play where Lewis Pitts, a lawyer, interviews Roland Wayne Wood on the witness stand, right? And when Pitts asks Wood if he's proud to be a racist, Wood responds, quote, yes, sir, I believe in the sovereign right of the sovereign people of the sovereign states of the Confederacy that has never surrendered. That's right. That's great. There you have it. The traitor surrendered, but not the Confederate government. I believe my country is occupied and I will fight as my forefathers fought to give me a free Christian republic. These ideas are, they never went away. Never. But they're reemergent today. So it's a very prescient play. Thank you. Yeah. I would love to see it done again right at this moment. I have never been so afraid for our democracy certainly during my lifetime, but when I read our history as a country, I don't think except for pre-Civil War times and Civil War times, I don't think we've ever been more at risk. And even then there was, the secessionists were seen as treasonous and there was a war over it. We now have treason right from within our Congress and also in the state legislatures around the country and on the ground with people. And so I do see a possible loss of democracy because it looks as if autocracy may come into play, but also the racial strife, the hatred, the splintering of the country. I don't think has ever been this severe except then. So I'm looking at 2022 even more than 24, I don't know about you as being crucial for the future. Yeah, and I once was, I think I went to Ellis Island to the great exhibition and there were photos and it was a big Ku Klux Klan demonstration actually in Long Branch in New Jersey at the Jersey Shore. They were marching and that's it. You know, I was always thinking, well it's something in the South, but as you both point out, this is a deeply rooted American system and you anticipated the future, but also you took a temperature of the moment. Why did you say, I'm gonna write my own place, I'll do these interviews, even though it was not such a well-known practice and as Carol said, you were pioneering this. Why not just taking the classes, the checkups and the Tennessee Williams you also did and others? Why did you feel you had to create theater in this? Why, what Carol calls the theater of the real? I think perhaps because I'm the daughter of an historian and often I had big ideas that I wanted to get out there and I think he admired the real and non-fiction and the historical record more than fiction and certainly the fevered imagination of his then young daughter and I wanted to prove things to him that's the best I can do. All I know is that one day I was looking for a new play, I wanted to direct a new play and the new plays that I was reading were always, there was a period in the 70s and early 80s when everything seemed to be in sort of in kitchens, but talking about more, it was a lower middle class white ethnics talking about relationships and I found that mildly interesting and I liked often they were very violent and I thought they were fun to direct but I wanted to direct something that was about ideas and I happened to be, I was in college at the time and my father had been made head of the American Jewish committees or history project on Holocaust survivors and Carol mentioned my first play Anula in autobiography of a survivor and I opened as folder on his desk and there was an interview between a mother and a daughter on the Upper West Side of New York and the daughter asked her mother, you know, she said, finally, we have an excuse to talk you would never talk to me about what happened and I wanna know how you survived and her mother who had been a ballerina in the National Ballet of Prague said she was in the camp on a bunk bed along with all the other people and utter misery and she said how she kept alive is that she would close her eyes and she would picture a moment of perfect beauty and she saw herself on point in a pool of light with her partner in her tutu and just picturing a perfect turn and she said she did that over and over and she was sure that's how she survived and I was just, you know, crying I thought it was remarkably beautiful and I asked my father if I could turn it into a one act play a mother daughter play and he said no, he said it belongs in the archives and the American Jewish committee I'm dying to find that play, that interview and he said, but I think you should do your own and the next day I came down for breakfast and he'd bought me a tape recorder and he said, go out and do your own and that started me on my journey and the first play as Carol mentioned was Anula and I went to Europe with my college roommate and interviewed her and who had survived and also then went to my grandmother's village in Poland and only she and her sister survived of this huge family because they had come earlier to the United States and documented that as well. So that started me and then I realized that even more than what I could make up I was always just astonished by the beauty of how people speak when I was able to and some ways make a poetry out of the language of real people. I would boil it down to a kind of stage poetry and muscularity of poetry and I was always surprised by what actually happened that there was something to be learned if you so often it goes against what you were taught and how to construct a well-made play but if you have to, if you give yourself and I was very strict with myself I never changed the facts and so I had to wrestle with what actually happened even when they were inconvenient truths and by doing that is constantly making more complex the story and that's I think why they may last because there's no everyone's right and everyone's wrong, people are complex, situations are complex and when I found that I was astonished by something I would share that with the audience and I would find that that would often astonish others and that was sort of my rule of thumb and I just could not stop doing it. It's very hard work I have to say when I've had the chance to sit down just right out of my imagination I feel so easy not to say that by great playwrights who will write strictly from their imaginations are not working hard they're working very hard but this was a different form where I had to find a way to make theatrical the mess of real life and it was a fascinating, fascinating journey. So in a certain sense it's the same in the kind of writing I do or it can be the same in that one doesn't want to just pursue a singular idea and leave out all the other stuff that predicts your idea and that's where it becomes really interesting and really challenging but could you give some examples of inconvenient truths that you encountered while trying to write some of your play stuff? Well in Greensboro, there's the bottom. They had gone down the path of they started out as good liberal union organizers anti-racist workers wanting to work arm in arm with this was a lot of them were northerners, northeasterners and were dedicated to justice in the south and their Maoism was a problem which they later, none of them are Maoists now let's put it that way they made a mistake of also using inflammatory rhetoric they went marching around for their anti-clan demonstration with signs of death to the clan well, those fellows took umbridge at that so you wanna kill us, we'll kill you and they came armed so I embraced that and I talked to this five of them I became very, very fond of and I very much admire and I admire their early idealism and continued idealism and their sense of social justice and said, well, where are you on this now? And rather than try to get around it I heard them critique themselves I encouraged them to say, well, what did you looking back now, not to blame the victim or anything but what would you have done differently now? What do you think now? And I got an outpouring of such interesting information of how they began to rethink themselves politically and yet they are still all engaged in a new way to effect change so for example, Nelson Johnson who becoming a Maoist and had been a student activist in his youth before he joined this group realized in the black community the way to effect change was through the church and so he's a minister for a poor people's church he continues the struggle he does so much work in Greensboro and beyond but he found his way that way Paul Berman's on as he said I guess I'm just a liberal guy he does his own anti-racist work from New York City he was one of the survivors but he was severely injured and he and his wife Sally do a lot of work with Native Americans and Sally has found out that she's part Native American and she's done her kind of work in that and they do a lot of work in a different way but they found their way and this shock to their systems they could have just given up and become apolitical and gone quiet but they didn't and that to me was very interesting as well but when you talk about the press at that time their affiliation as Maoists made it easy for the press to say two extremist groups fought it out whereas in fact, though they were I think Maoism is an extreme position though they adjust the day before decided to join the Maoist party they learned from what happened to them and though some of them ended up being paralyzed by grief others picked themselves up and went forward so the inconvenient truth was when they were called communist often that was a term used in the South for any people who were working for civil rights and specially rights for black people this time it was true, they were that was an inconvenient truth that I had to wrestle with That's great, that's great So what are you working on now and how does this formidable past work figure into what you're thinking about now? Oh that's interesting I have been commissioned by three wonderful producers Michael Wolk, Kumiko Yoshin and Robin De Levita to write the stage adaptation of The Pianist which is one of Shilman's memoirs so it's not on the Polanski film but on the actual memoir and I've been working on it for three years now and during the pandemic did a Zoom, directed a Zoom reading of it of my new draft and we're going to go forward hopefully this coming season in the spring and that clearly I feel like I've come full circle with Anula and in fact, what's funny is Michael went to graduate school with me at University of Minnesota when I was on the Bush Fellowship with the Guthrie and the university and he remembered Anula at Guthrie II, my first play I mean, I hadn't spoken to him it would have been 1979, what is that, 40 years and he said that play is always stuck with me and I thought you'd be the perfect writer for this I don't want Michael, oh my God Incredible You probably haven't kept up with me but I'm a Broadway producer now but I've kept up with you and I think that this would be great for you so my first instinct was oh my God, I can't do another Holocaust story but then my husband looked at me and said you know, every time you say you're not going to do something and you resist a story is when you end up doing it so in fact, after reading the memoir which I had never read and knowing it wasn't going to be based on the movie I said yes and I said but I do have to go to Poland I have to go to Warsaw I have to walk those streets I need to, I need to be there and so they said fine and also because I was going I contacted a number of people who were part of the Jewish Museum which is one of the greatest museums I have ever gotten to anywhere in the world that the Museum of the History of Polish Jews that went, the new one on the Warsaw ghetto yeah, I could just stay there for a month and I contacted them and they said, well, you know if you're, because my grandfathers my paternal grandfather's family came from Warsaw and I said, is there any way I could find their graves or is there any way I could find out about them? Absolutely, they made a family tree for me and then they gave me a guide through the Jewish cemetery in Warsaw which is one of the most fascinating places it's a whole city of the dead it's hundreds of years of Jewish life in Warsaw and I had no idea how, it was like New York for Jews I mean it was a place where people were the most free they'd been in Europe and I'd always thought of Poland as a place where we all got killed I didn't realize how things flourished at different points and I found out I had a rabbi in the family more said than the grand rabbi at one point but also they took me to my great grandmother's grave and I put a stone on her grave and it was life changing and realized our knowledge of the family sort of stopped with little stories that the family would tell but that we would never complete and because of that's where everyone died so you don't talk about it that's the old country we're in the new country, we're going forward and I've always wanted to go back and suddenly I was like, oh, you know I too am a Warsaw Jew so I was writing from a very personal place with the piano story and it's been a great, great a great project for me it's opened me up in so many new ways and because the memoir did not have details on his family as much as one would hope to make a play I had to invent from little bits of hints from the memoir who those people were so there's a lot of writing that I was able to do which I love as well and then milled that with the voice of the pianist Spilman himself but it does hook up with so much of what else I do because as you know, Carol even probably more than Frank so many, I usually break the fourth wall and all my plays I think and he is speaking directly to the audience it's a very intimate journey through his experience and that has been wonderful again working not from my own interviews with people but from his very personal account of what happened to him during the war so I'm using all of those kinds of that skill set that I've been developing over so many years with the strict of documentaries but this is still a theater of testimony piece so Frank and I were together many, many years on a tour of Poland remember that? Yes, of course because I got to Agranda, yeah Yeah, yeah and that was one time and Frank was having a particular experience from his youth because you'll have to tell that to us Frank but I later went back to Poland and a friend of mine, Barbara Kruschenblatt-Ginbeth Oh, Barbara was so helpful to me, yeah Oh, she's amazing She's in New York so this was before the museum was finished and I met her there and I had just seen the film Unfinished I don't know if you've seen that extraordinary film and we met in the graveyard and then Barbara took me so by the images of the film in my mind we met in the graveyard Barbara took me on a whole tour of the perimeter of what used to be the Warsaw ghetto which was vast and just the curvilinear shape of the museum was there but it was still museum construction but anyway, after this incredible day there was a little party because a book called Apollonia which is extraordinary it was just published in my series but then I went back to the hotel and there was a naked man standing in the lobby and I just kind of froze and it was like a friend of mine who's a psychoanalyst I said, I can't describe what happened to me in that moment it was like my whole day came rushing at me and got embodied in this literally there was a naked man in the hotel lobby and my friends said, well that's a classic example of the uncanny so that was my Warsaw experience at that time just full of these incredible things but Frank, you had an experience when we went on that Polish cultural council tour of Poland of your own youth Yeah, it's true did reconnect me also in a very light way, of course that things that were unspoken about in family and history my father was born in Silesia in Apollia or up in at the time actually the same year almost as Peter Schumann in the same town that's why I feel also such a strong connection to him never talked about it never went back to school after it was nine or 10 years old it was a displaced person, a refugee people had to be up to the end of the world distributed in West Germany actually with police and machine guns because nobody wanted to take for seven, eight million Germans who were now displaced in because Russia, Stalin took a part of Poland and said actually this has already been has been Russian territory for some time ago and so the big liberator took away stuff from Poland and then took apart from Germany at that time and that you know, but actually that's your homeland and there was an exchange I had never been I had always avoided it also my father never talked to me about it actually also when I asked him and so it was a very odd feeling but I cannot even compare to anything that Emily must have felt walking through those stones and so Emily, a question that this idea of both theater of memory and working through questions of the societies have was our families, our fathers you actually Hannah Muller would say you were on a mission your father gave you a mission the father, the idea of a homelands idea that I want to be then is there and you have to do something but in this time of Corona did that have an impact on you with all your incredible experience as a playwright, as a director but also as an artistic director in about three decades what happened for you well I went inward really and then when George Floyd was killed and the racial reckoning came again this is where having been alive for quite a while comes in handy I was so thrilled to see unlike the sixties and I have to also preface this that I grew up my father's best friend was John Hope Franklin another great, great historian who is really the founder of African-American Studies in America I mean one of the great, great, great historians and like a second father to me and so I've been studying black people and Jews and my father's field also was ethnic history and he studied immigration so he was talking about pluralism and diversity with different words from the time I was a little girl so what's going on now is both familiar and unfamiliar but when the reckoning happened I realized two things one I was glad that I was no longer an artistic director both because of the having to deal with the horror of furloughing and people being out of work and how to run a theater in a pandemic but also because there was a new way that institutions especially the theater were going to have to look at themselves and make change and because McCarter had always my core mission from the time I arrived was to support the work of women and people of color in particular I felt like I had done that in my institution for 30 years now how could I be useful in the larger conversation? So I just began to sit back and deeply listen to what our profession was talking about and then when asked I started to both consult and be an ally for those who I had forged deep relationships with over the last 30 and 40 years in the community and that's been both humbling and enriching and it's enlarged my thinking a great deal and I've enjoyed it I'm also concerned about how the conversation is going but I also have never been more optimistic that we're going to see change eventually for the good for all of us in these areas for particularly those groups that have been left out of the conversation and out of the work for so long and we're going to fully see America on stage and backstage and in all of our workings in the theater we will come out of this I think a stronger and more just profession and country, hopefully well country I'm not so sure that's another conversation but in the theater I hope. So I've spent a lot of time I mean there's another project I'm doing which is the Yin and the Yang I'm writing a new musical the book of a musical with Lucy Simon and Susan Birkenhead and Victoria Clark and so we're having a fantastic time in fact we're in the third day of a workshop I've left the workshop to come join this conversation and we're having a marvelous time and it's a love story but also taking place in a divided town which is a stand in for a divided country so can't seem to just write just a love story tried but can't do it but I was able to really go deep and be writing again full-time writing again but also thinking deeply about what I was able to accomplish with my goals of equity for women and people of color and then where I couldn't go all the way and why, what is more systemic what makes it harder than just say well just do it, right? Well, that's how I started just do it, why, what was the pushback and why? And getting deeper inside of that has been a great set of lessons and I'm loving this very difficult time I find it extremely stimulating and challenging in a good way most days, some days I find it just too exhausting and upsetting but most days I'm stimulated and optimistic about change Yeah, I think it's been important for me to find a handle some way or other so to not get depressed, to not feel defeated and that can be many different kinds of things it can be mentoring colleagues in writing and it can be really working very, very closely with students and getting them to articulate ideas and be eloquent in their thinking and writing but having that handle I do feel also a little bit optimistic I mean, the protests were for last summer were nicely integrated in terms of white people and Latinx people, Native Americans and I thought that was remarkable I think Anna DeMiersmith also remarked on that she said on a news program that she thought that was one sign of the success of our educational system at least part of our educational system I also think at the moment we were calling for diversity that there were already people who were able to step in I'm seeing black newscasters, commentators, writers journalists that suddenly there is no pipeline issue the people waiting to step in, right? So something has been a little bit right that we enabled that I think that's right and I think we learned a lot of things from the last time and one of them is allyship that when the civil rights movement began to peter out is when, in my opinion, when black power became just too much the ethos of the time and Jews were thrown out of the civil rights movement white people were thrown out of the civil rights movement and people say we're gonna do it alone I understand and did then and due to this day that feeling but I think that a lot was learned by this generation saying, no, we need to be arm in arm and I think a lot of people were surprised you need little towns in Colorado and you see a whole bunch of white people with black lives matters walking through their town you go, all right, I mean that there is a sense that because we were all at home and we couldn't get away and a lot of us were watching television more than we ever had and there you could not take your eyes off the fact that one black person after another was being murdered and you couldn't say, what was this self defense was that because the video cameras were on whether it was someone taking it on their cell phone or it was on the police recorders and there was no turning away from it there was no denying it anymore it was a true reckoning and I think there are more people in this country of goodwill and more people who believe in a fairness than don't and began to look at the systems involved and began to look at history I mean, we are a country unlike Europe, the European countries that seem to know their history, Americans a lot of Americans have no historical background I mean, I knew about Tulsa from the time as a little girl because John Hope Franklin's father was in the massacre so I mean, he was studying this since, oh my God for 50 plus 60 years but that the country knows about it now. Yes, yes, increasingly, yeah, I mean I'm just finding this all very helpful and hopeful. Emily, the country is changing it has perhaps already changed if you look at American theater, what was wrong? What is wrong and what needs to change if you would run the zoo, if you would run the circus? Well, I don't want to sound too ideological but the truth is that the theater has been run by white men for the longest time but so has everything else so it's not just the theater that has this problem though I must say everyone thinks oh, the theater is so liberal and not just not and Carol and I know from the early days of the women's movement, I mean when I was directing in the 70s and 80s I was often the first woman ever to direct on a stage I was directing on I was often the only woman ever to have had a play written by a woman on the stage I mean, this was just the way it was and certainly that was true for people of color as well so it was a big deal when I, I mean the first time I ever directed on the Guthrie main stage was man first woman to direct early, you know, it was 79, 80 same thing when I took here when I was the artistic director in 1990, man first woman to, you know lead MacArthur theater I mean, it just such nonsense, you know they loved making that little joke all the time so that's why it sticks in my head it's very recent that you began to see women though they founded the not-for-profit theater movement if they didn't found their own theaters they didn't run a theater and they often weren't directing there for people of color it was even worse men and women and now you're seeing the numbers slightly shift and we'll see when the numbers come out now with the reopening now that people have had to think deeply about this they have been challenged by we see white America and the different producing groups that are now getting together as black producers what how will these numbers change in actual productions who is being heard and seen and I think we're going to see a shift and every single union and guild I'm part of or focus group I've been part of there isn't anyone who hasn't thought about it who's a major player in the business some of them are like I don't want to have anything to do with it but they're in the minority most of them know they have to some of them are doing it because they want to but a majority between that I want to and I have to it's a big majority so I think we're going to see a shift coming out of the pandemic and I'm hoping it isn't just a short blip and then it goes back to business as usual I'm hoping that it's gone deep enough I think it might have just because people are setting up systems now they know they can't have an all white office for example they know they can't have an all white backstage now whether the commercial people are going to be able to make a change it's going to depend a lot on the unions and I'm talking about not equity but not the stage directors and choreographers but the teamsters I mean, local one is everyone gets grandfathered into that it's been an all white, all male bastion for a very, for what is it, 80, 100 years I mean, these systems weren't built in a day and they won't be dismantled in a day but I think there are little chinks they know that's not going to fly much longer they're going to have to change too so I'm hopeful something I wonder about is there's been a common refrain I want to see people like me on stage in films, in on television and I understand that I mean, I could state it personally you know, all the parodies of female-ness or whatever, white female-ness but I worry that, well, I understand that I respect that I think we need a diversity of stories but what about entering someone else's story, right? I want to see the lives of people who are actually not like me, right? But whose lives may converge with mine in ways that I had little knowledge of so I'm worried a little bit how are we going to solve this representational problem? And there's been, you know you can only write a story about a Native American, if you're Native American and actually wanting to enter telling your own stories I think that's good but I also know there are incredible historians and playwrights who are writing stories of other people as well as their own people I think is essential to a healthy environment I couldn't agree with you more, Carol I mean, this is one of the things that makes me the saddest but it isn't as if we haven't seen this before remember, we saw it also in the 60s and 70s you know, appropriation is not a new term but I remember having a panel with Entozaki, Shange, Tulani Davis Athol Fugar, Joyce Carol Oates a whole bunch of wonderful writers and Joyce brought that up she said, you know I write a lot about Black people and I worry and Tulani said you write about it very well and that's the difference and then Athol said what I think you know, the absurdity would be that I can only write about an South African straight male right that means I'm not an artist the mark of an artist you're only limited by your imagination or lack thereof and I totally believe that so but I think we're gonna have to go through the pendulum swinging a little too far to come back because it is an absurdity or artists to say that to each other because in fact it is about imagination and I'm like you I don't go to the theater to see me or anyone like me I go to the theater to learn about someone who doesn't either look like me or act like me or have my I want to learn I'm curious about other people now I get to say that because I, you know there are more people who look like me or perhaps have more of my background on stage than some of the other people we're talking about so once there is more diversity on the stage where people can go and see themselves then I think this is gonna loosen up I really do because at the end of the day I think people want to see stories of people that the stories they don't know not just the stories they do know yeah, yeah, yeah the story that they haven't heard told yeah, yeah Emily also as a personal question when did you find out as a when you're growing up that theater would help you to create meaning in life or that it made sense to you tell us a bit about your story well I didn't grow up going to the theater the first piece of theater I saw was my father had written the biography of Fiorello H. LaGuardia and there was a musical called Fiorello and they'd used his book so he was invited to go and we went from North Hampton, Massachusetts my father taught at Smith College because he believed in the education of women and so off we trundled as this little girl to Broadway and I really loved it and I listened to that album all the time we knew every word and we got to go backstage and meet Tom Bosley who was playing LaGuardia and I was thrilled but it never occurred to me that was something that a serious person did because in our house you had to be a serious person and you had to make the world a better place and you had to think about what you believed in and so that was entertainment and entertainment was great but I didn't think that was going to be my life struggle so it was high school we moved to Chicago John Hope Franklin actually had recruited my father to the University of Chicago and was at the lab school and which was a great progressive experimental school and there was a theater department and basically I got a crush on a boy who was in the theater and so I went up to watch a rehearsal one day and I remember he was in he was playing No Good Boyo in Under Milkwood and I thought he was really wonderful and then I was told that if you worked on the play you could go to the cast party so I worked on the play and I became enchanted with theater and I thought theater was musicals I didn't understand so here was this beautiful poetic piece and I thought I was going to be a novelist or an English teacher or I was going to be a social worker I didn't know what I was going to do but this was just captivating and I was also a musician and there was music in it and so the crush disappeared but I fell madly in love with the form, with the theater and I started going from sweeping floors to doing makeup, to doing props to finally acting and I acted for quite a while and then my junior year in high school this wonderful drama teacher said you see the whole play I think you think like a director and he told me to direct so I started directing everything came together my love of literature and music and visual art and interpreting I loved, I was a French my French was very good and I loved something called Explication du Text which was when you really take apart almost word for word which is what you do with actors a text it all just came together for me and I thought oh this is what I love I had no idea you could make a life out of it I had no idea you could make a living in the theater but as I got more and more into it and then went to college at Harvard at Radcliffe I then found myself though I was an English major I spent all my time at the lobe making theater I was acting, I was directing and then William Alfred who was a great teacher at Harvard and he was also Chris Durang's teacher he gave, there was no drama department there he gave one seminar in playwriting and I took it and I was the only freshman he led in and I started writing and that's when I met Chris and that's when I he was gonna go off to Yale Drama School and I suddenly began to be aware of the theater as a profession and he was writing these wild brilliant he was Chris Durang even then I realized oh my God you can, it's a world I didn't know and then I began to read about it and then my father gave me a book about Halle Flanagan and said you know you can make a difference on a lot of levels in the theater I've been researching this for you and suddenly well you know the University of Chicago I grew up in Homewood Flossmore, Illinois oh sure and my grandmother lived in Hyde Park which is where the University of Chicago that's where I was and but you know early life was in a town called Park Forest which was one of the first towns in the United States I think to openly say we'll have no covenant laws or anyone of any religion can live here and then and there were a lot of former war veterans but not all my father was not a war veteran and then 10 years later they said and anyone of any race can also live here so the ambiance of that definitely was profound and stayed with me but also University of Chicago was you know kind of wonderful and had people from all over the world on campus and that was when we visited my grandmother eye-opening and also like your town one of the only integrated neighborhoods not only in Chicago but in the country there were multiple couples and people went to school together and had relationships and friendships and you know that's how I thought the world was going to be exactly, exactly yeah I was formed there so it was a formidable place yes, formidable place and the late 60s I was there you know with the you know the weathermen and SDS and the nation of Islam like Muhammad lived three doors down from us and this was a cauldron you know in the Black Panther Party and so I became very radicalized when I was there in the late 60s yeah, yeah, it was an amazing place it's interesting that you had a similar a similar experience yeah, yeah, the ambiance was extraordinary yeah, yeah and it had been for a number of years many years actually so and Emily you would say the moment we are in at the right now you say this is comparable something will switch, something will turn you know you say it's a perhaps there's a more positive outlook but you feel how would you compare those two well, there was a real revolution for women's rights it was women's rights, civil rights and I and it was you know at the anti-war movement as well but it created a huge it was a tectonic shift in American life at that point I think the women's movement was in some ways went the furthest and then civil rights movement went very far and then stalled and then the women's movement stalled too but yes, huge shifts happened at that time and I think the same thing is happening again 50 years later we do seem to go in 50-year cycles in this country and I do think we're in another tectonic shift yeah and I'm hoping as successful as the last one was or more successful more successful but we couldn't have come this far without that previous one what do you think, Carolyn? I agree, I mean I think of it as the women's movement really building upon the civil rights movement of the 50s and that creates a lot of ideas in the 60s you know and merchant female writers with whom I've also been deeply concerned you know, Adrian Kennedy there's just a huge sudden growth of female writers that begin in the 60s great antecedents before there's actually lots of plays by black female writers about lynching, anti-lynching plays so yeah, the 60s was this kind of amalgamation of different movements of yeah, civil rights, feminism but then one of the things that happens of pride gay and lesbian rights there's a called Stonewall written in the early 70s in which yeah, the performers in that particular play were afraid of being identified as being lesbian or gay of having been in the play shaped their identity because the movement was very young and there was a lot of uncertainty in the air but then I think a certain kind of corporatism takes over the 80s the late 70s 80s corporatism and postmodernism which really makes things dysfunctional and empties out a kind of political motivation and advocacy in certain ways agreed but does grow significant kinds of theory that can help us out today but today again there's you know, there's a lot of different movements the reemergence of the women's movement with me too in ways that have been mind blowing across you know, from local theaters to film and television and the environment again and we had the environmental movement earlier right? So there's like a bundle and happening and I think that that's good I think what we've learned from the pandemic is that it really matters everything really matters what we do environmentally how we treat one another what we do, you know, within the theater within the institutional structures of theater within the institutional structures of education I'd like to see education improve we all have our own stories about our institutional familiarity the functionality of it all on the front burner again Yeah and there's also was an anti-capitalist strain in much of what went on in the late 60s and it's back in new forms Yeah which is interesting and exciting because you even have the idea I mean as a European I think you might find this amusing but when you talk about democratic socialism in this country it can be a buzzword for terror as soon as you hear the word socialist half the country their hair is on fire but that's becoming a term to actually discuss again is interesting and hopeful we'll see how far that can go since we have an absolutely dysfunctional health system and social welfare system so it's I think it's a very exciting time when on my stronger days when I talk about what could happen get the better of me It is hopeful and we had, you know reports from Chile just two weeks ago where this election happened the constitution will be rewritten by 141 delegates it came out of the big women's day March over a million women came together then teenagers refused to accept the payment raised for subway tickets and they went on the streets and it was a huge success so there are I don't wonder why this is not more reported it's the end of the Pinochet era in some certain ways so there are hopeful things coming out and I hope that we will use those words again that seem to be banned and it's a great desire balance that, you know, I am on the extreme right of the absolute extreme left and that's a good place to be and so we should really think, you know and these demarcation lines are renegotiated now in a good way and that we all have to do something that's a very big difference, you know also was not enough to show on stage what's wrong with the world we not only have to show alternatives what could what is thinkable on stage could happen in real life and model that's why theater is so great that's also why it's censored because it does but now also it's time to do something and to say, you know, have a participation and we are coming closer to the end and I'm really sorry I mean, maybe we should have a part two it was, you know, so important Harry Perlov, you know, to hear from leaders, female leaders in the country, you know about such a long history and we need to know more and we also listen carefully what the experience really were and yours was so important that great David Goddard from the Riverside studio where there was the Tarkovsky and the Cantor and Beckett rehearsed and everybody came in he invited you early on you were a voice that also traveled across the oceans early on and there are very few of them so this is really all our respect for your work as a last question what did inspire you in this time what did you listen to music what did you read or what films or people discussion what in that search I guess we all had you said we went inside we connected to our inner world which is important and Carl Jung said the big problem is that so much is from the outside comes into us we lost that we need to connect the dreams are immediate no one has seen it before you create them yourself so but what did you what was inspiring for you what did you follow what gave you what kept you warm and sharpened your knives well that's so interesting my personal life came in balance I worked so hard I had been overworked for 30 years and suddenly I was in my home and as I hadn't really lived in my home I woke up had a slug of coffee and ran to the theater another grandchild was born and suddenly all of this with all the horror and death going on outside here was this new life and I found myself absolutely besotted by her and making her promises that I was going to help her enter a better world and whispering a hurryer the way my mother whispered in mine which was we need you to make a better place and we're counting on you and your energy and your intelligence my dear little girl to to do what you can to save to save humanity when we're facing extinction it's very simple to have the hope of having an infant in your arms at a point when you realize that the planet is so endangered not necessarily as a planet but for human beings being able to live on it that facing extinction as a species this next generation is so key so I began to really look in terms of what my priorities were how much it had to do with family how much it had to do with writing and making a contribution with something that could last and possibly be teaching tools so when I started working on the pianist I wanted people still need to hear this and then as I was writing it before the election and I realized how fast fascism can rise which is really what the pianist is about how it happens so fast before you're able to get out and protect yourself that these that the lessons that I've learned from you know the blood memory but also from my the teachers and mentors before me what I want to pass down that became very clear to me not to teach fear but to my mother once said to me when you hear them when you when you hear them say something listen they may be telling you the truth your enemies it's just not people were laughing at Hitler for too long he looked like Charlie Chaplin he told us what he was going to do and he did it Trump told us what he was going to do and he's done it all along the line believe him you hear it believe it and then what are you going to do about it so these small kernels of wisdom you know I just want to really became more and more precious to me as I began to clear away the clutter of overwork and really start deeply listening I also during the pandemic reconnected to the people that mean the most to me and that I love but also the people whom I've learned the most from so I started Gloria Steinem and I began again talking regularly you know and there are many other people who are not as famous as Gloria but you know who are dear to me and our figures that I think of as sometimes being very wise and I realized who really meant a lot to me so this simplification was the biggest lesson I learned and the prioritizing of people to learn from and then I won't tell you the series the TV series that I caught up on why not tell us what is Emily well seen a French village did you see a French village I adored it I just found it extraordinary and I started to get very very involved in the long form a place to call home and lots and Borg and somehow seeing drama at the length of a novel became extremely interesting to me so long form writing and how you get to really know these characters and have watched them going through time just fascinated me because I had never I was always in the theater I never had time to watch these things and I'm hooked on the long form well maybe you'll do a Queensborough TV series and you direct it in a live chat why not you know it's an important theme and it's a new way a different way of telling it we'll see Emily really thank you so much for sharing and Carol for being with us and also you know for pointing towards the work of Emily and it is significant it is important and it has really has made a difference and I think you're absolutely right I think that's quite an image and I will keep that in my mind when you you hold your granddaughter in your arms and having just visited the great grandmother's grave and of planet as you say is facing extinction for the human species and it's true with the hour survival is endangered like never before and question is how much can you really tolerate a lot but what what is no longer tolerable and how what do we do in this moment that's too what to do and and I think what you do in your your life and your work an artistic expression and also as a center of a community is important as a big model for all of us and we all have to think in that way you do and it is quite stunning to hear also from you to say this moment we are in is as significant as shifting tectonically as the 60s and we should be part of it and we should be actively part of it and something will happen with or without us so it's better to be part of it so thank you Emily thank you Carol for being here with all your expertise and and also following up our great talk on last week I had a little sound problem for the first time but I bought a new computer hopefully it worked today and better so thank you all and tomorrow for the closing of the week we have the two young curators in Berlin from Berlin who as every Berlin or now is actually not from Berlin is Johanna Warsawa she's a curator and together with Oval Dormugosulu a Turkish curator they created what they call the Balkona the balconies artists in Prenzlauer Berg neighborhood created work a festival of art produced on the balconies for the people in the street they took two editions very success very interesting work and we haven't seen that here and so we're going to listen a bit about that next week and always well we will hear from French a writer a French African writer we will hear from puppetry and social practice what is changing the puppetry community it was Claudia Orenstein as I was leading it you know is changing and has an increased awareness and continuing what they always did and if all works out and we hope we'll have the great Pina Bausch dance company with us you know Pina died they know everything was shut down what does it mean for a company like hers and Emily can understand what that really means and so we hopefully get an update also from that so we continue our talk just thank you all for listening thanks to HowlRound for being such a great host but mostly to our listeners and again you know what Emily says is well it's meaningful to all of us and for our lives and not only when we talk about theater how they have to diversify we have to reach out we should diversify our lives invite people be open meet people so what artists do is represent it for something and they are on the right side of justice on the right side of freedom as Emily the fight for freedoms Emily was on that all her life and if people would have listened to her this country would be a much better place so we have to be taken very serious about the artist not just look at it but also try how can we adopt our lives to these things and so as Carol said you know the movements of feminism of the civil rights struggle they have a history they have a present but they also have a future and we in theater but also in our own lives have to be part of it so thank you all and thanks to HowlRound again and the BJ and Sia and I hope Emily and Carol to see all those in person soon bye bye thank you so much thank you