 closer to the holidays, Thanksgiving is behind us. And I feel at the Siegel Center, we already have a Thanksgiving, we are talking to writers, theater artists who use the time of Corona to organize their thoughts, project they have been working on for years and get it into a form, get it done, printed and have them out in the world to share. It's an extraordinary lineup and we have with us. And today we have the great honor to have Anne Catanio and with us, everybody in the American theater, of course, knows who she is, the great, great dramaturg, a living treasure, they would say in Japan, based at Lincoln Center Theater, but there's so much, much more to her and we will learn about it. And she wrote a fantastic, great book about the art of dramaturgy. And how important that is, we will find out. Joe Papp, who read the public theater, had never heard about a dramaturg before he met Anne. So she has a lot of stories to tell. Anne, welcome back to Segal Talks. It's always been so important to hear from you. We have such a high respect for you and your work. And so where are you and how is life? I am locked down in Mid Manhattan as I have been for the past two years, survived an empty city, survived all kinds of terrible things that happened in Midtown, and the theater is struggling to reopen. Our audiences are coming back. We're hoping that all the variants go away. And we'll see where we are in a couple of months. Yeah, you lived in the section of town where all of a sudden, you know, people from prisons were in the hotels that were empty and it looked a little bit more like the Kojak Telyas Savala's movies we saw in the 70s. I felt a little bit, we had a board meeting of our building two nights ago and I said sort of like having a board meeting in September 1945, you know, you have no idea what we've been through. But New York is a city of survivors. We've survived and the theater will never die. We'll be back, we'll see in what form and what shape it's always evolved, it's always changed and that will continue. So I'm looking forward to seeing what it looks like. Yeah, amazing. Of course, one of the many, many impressive lines in your book is the dramaturg is the one who remembers and you do remember, you note taker. And so we now, we'll hear from Anne for everybody and also our international listeners who do not know about Anne Katanya. She's the dramaturg of Lincoln Center Theater and many look at Lincoln Center Theater as kind of the national theater of the United States of America, which we do not have, but it perhaps is the closest we have. She is the co-executive director, editor of the Lincoln Center Theater Review with the great John Guere. We once did a wonderful evening honoring that extraordinary work, providing context in the good old idea of the dramaturgische Breplette to the place. So to give us more information about what we're gonna talk about. And she created an extraordinary organization that Lincoln Center's directors lab for over 30 years, bringing directors, thousands of them to America, to New York under difficult circumstances, very little money, visas and 60, 70 of them for three, four weeks of work and talk to each other. And she says they don't learn really anything. There is nothing for them except they share an experience. And she was three times the president of the literary managers and dramaturgs of America, very important and significant organization. Look at that LMDA join if you can, if you want. I think this is more connected to the future of theater than it's past and they were pioneers and her colleagues. And she is the recipient of the LMDA's first Lessing Award for Lifetime Achievement in Dramaturgie. And she's a 2020 Guggenheim Fellow. So a highly decorated officer, soldier, general in the field of theater and worker really in the vineyard who I respect so much because of her daily detailed work, really caring about the field and everybody who comes in to her, she has worked, it was an incredible amount of artists. We will hear about a little bit more. She was with Hamlet machine of Bob Wilson, the dramaturg, might people say the most significant play in his life, Wilson's, but also of Hannah Muller. She translated perhaps Brecht's greatest play, the Galileo. She translated it and got approved by the Brecht estate and incredible. She worked with William Borrows, Jane and Paul Bowles. Her boss at the Phoenix Theater were the one who paid for Brecht's tickets to escape to Switzerland after he was interrogated in the committee for un-American activities. And the list goes on and on. So, and why did you write the book? How did this book become about? Thank you for having me, Frank. I appreciate the fact that in the age of TikTok, we're actually having a conversation about what goes on backstage, the secrets, the history, the whole tradition of theater that's 2,500 years old. It's a great thing that you're doing and I'm very grateful you invited me. I was actually approached by Yale University Press to write this book and given a very generous advance about four years ago. Everything that was once in my head that you've been so kind to describe is now emptied by the events of COVID and it's on the pages of this book. So it's there, thank God, just in time because of all the things that have happened. When I was approached by Yale, it made me instantly a little wary because I had once been approached by an astrowriter book by a man, actually the guy who wrote Twyla Tharp's book, The Creative Habit, which was a bestselling book from about 20 years ago. Then it turns out I didn't realize this was largely bought, was very bestselling book by business executives who would take the book with their staffs on corporate retreats and use the exercises to make their companies more creative or think about this. I didn't know that. And he wanted me to write a book about the director's lab which had just, it was probably five years old. It was really trying a lot of pretty radical things. It was really cooking. So he took me to launch. These were in the days when publishing, it's hard to believe this now is something that you can even remember was really about fantastically interesting and in some cases very challenging books but it was also about lunch. The publishers went to fabulous lunches. I had had a translation published by Forrest Rouse and Drew of Botterstrasse Play and the Forrest Rouse and Drew Bebald, Roger Strauss went to his lunch places. My project that I put together for the acting company, adaptations of check-off, short stories which went around the country and went to London by Wendy Wasserstein and Spaulding Gray and Samart Williams and John Gware and Irene Fornes and stuff was published by Knopp. They had their uptown lunch places. So this guy took me to this really fancy lunch and I wasn't really sure what the point of the lunch was but he said to me, I want you to write a book about the director's lab. And it's really simple to do. It's what I did with Twyla. I want you to just boil down what you're doing in the director's lab to eight things. That's what a book is. Like I just finished this book called Insulin the Lie. I thought, I told the eight lies about insulin that and each was a chapter and that's a book and you could do that because you know there's so much going on in the director's lab and we could make a lot of money about this. So I was already feeling a little guilty about the lunch. Okay, it was a write-off. I know that. And suddenly I had this major revelation which ties into what this new book is about which is that I have spent my entire life trying to make things more complicated, not less complicated. And I had to tell them, I just don't think I'm capable of doing this. I can't sum up the director's lab in eight simple statements. I wouldn't know what they are. I wouldn't, if I thought of eight, I could think of eight more and that was just in the first five years. And is insulin really a lie? I mean, the whole lunch was just a disaster. I felt terrible for him. So when Yellow approached me many years later, this was in the back of my mind. It was like, do I want to do this? I mean, the nightmare in my mind was writing a book like those books that you can get, like how to write a screenplay in eight easy steps, introduce the protagonist on the first page, introduce the antagonist on the third page. I mean, that's just not my idea of anything that I know about what I've been doing for the last 40 years. But I have been doing this very incredibly interesting and largely unknown job for four decades. And I do know a great deal about how it works. No one else will ever or should ever do it like I do. The theater is always evolving. It's always changing. It has new styles, new ways of telling stories, new ways of involving audiences physically and emotionally. That's what the whole progression of theater is about. But I do know a lot of things that I can pass on and quite a range of things that I can pass on as models. So I accepted the offer of the press sort of as a legacy project. And I spent about six months trying to think of what all of the things that I do and have done were sort of like the categories, how I read a play, how I work with playwrights, very, very different kinds and how I try in my best way to support them, how actors and designers approach a text, how to read words on a page, how to recognize non-text-based storytelling, how to work in archives, how to find plays that haven't been done before, have been lost or forgotten, how to run a dramaturgy office, how to write a thank you note, how to reject a play, how to log a play, those kinds of issues, how to work cross-culturally. That's a big thing of mine with plays from very different parts of the world, very different theater traditions, many not psychologically based as ours is. That's a really, there's a chapter on that in the book, very interesting. How to create your own initiatives, how to look at the field in the time that you're living in and say, this is missing, we should be doing this. This is what our field should be doing, gathering friends who feel the same way and creating initiatives and how to mediate between the audiences and the stage. There is no mediation really necessary. Bernard Gersten, who was our executive producer for many years used to say, on the stage communicates with the audience, but there's always audiences who are fine with that, but then there are always audiences who want more. And so how you do that and how you can really streamline that and enhance that is described in the book. And then the most difficult thing to some degree is how to interpret plays with directors, doctors are in charge, how to work on classical material as well as all the new plays that I've described. So I chose 10 plays after about six months of making these lists that I thought best exemplified the categories that I had chosen. And those are, they ended up being my 10 chapters. There were many plays that I worked on that I've worked on that I regret that I did not find a place or a chapter for in the book. The book to me already seemed very long, but I was surprised when I got the actual volume. Here it is. It's so slender, I was surprised. Thank God. I think Yale most definitely sees this as a textbook and it does include a syllabus and a reading list and a dramatrix toolkit and multiple appendixes and a brief history of percussion. But I sort of secretly see it as a glimpse backstage, sort of like how the cake is baked, how many different cakes are baked. If people have loved the work of these artists that I talk about or the work like that making new productions of Shakespeare or discovering new playwrights or working on initiatives that you create, this is how it was done. And in the course of writing the book I was asked to make a website. That was a big thing for me because I'm not on social media. So that's on your description of this session, thank you. But my whole website is about secretly going backstage and seeing how it's done. And that turned out to be kind of difficult because I wanted to get a picture of what we all in the theater know are the actor's call boxes when you go backstage and this dates back from when there was a time in the earth when there were no cell phones. When you wanted to connect with an actor on a Broadway stage or any other stage you just call the stage doorman and they would leave a message for the actor in the actor's mailbox. Well, you have no idea how many of these mailboxes have been removed. You can't find a picture of them on the internet. So I had to go in the middle of COVID and knock on stage doors. And I finally found a local one guy who had worked on mule bone. That's the Langston Hughes or Hurston piece who remembered me who took a picture for me in a closed theater. So it's a glimpse backstage. So it's more conversational as well as being a textbook like book. It's not as dry as that although it contains pretty much everything I know. That's the long answer to your question. Yeah, no, it's a very good answer. And I think it's a really a choices, a history, a memory of someone who spent decades, five decades in this theater. And yeah. I wanted to read one little thing that I forgot. Yeah, tell us, read us a little bit. Because trying to describe and trying to make a definition of dramaturgy is very difficult. And so I rely in the book on a short definition that was written by Michael Lupu. We called it Mickey Lupu, who was the longtime dramaturg at the Guthrie Theater. We worked with Garland Wright for many years. And he gave a, I think, the most brilliant definition of dramaturgy. It's early on in my book in the introduction. And it's short. And he says to limit the definition of dramaturgy to research and gathering of relevant background information is to leave out its true vitality and creativity. Dramaturgy functions as a sort of monitoring device meant to keep the process on course. Whether a barely audible yet persistent whisper or a vocally assertive and persuasive argument, dramaturgy does not emanate exclusively from one individual who qualifies as dramatur. Rather, it forms the underpinning of all intuitive or deliberate choices, thoughts, debates, and nurtures the passionate search for artistic truth on stage. Yeah. It's such a significant part of making theater. And as you point out, it has been, dramaturgs have been there for hundreds of years. They're always there, but they perhaps will not recognize as the lighting designer. I think one of your lines to say, you're how come I'm not on the first page, but the doc trainer, you know, who got a billing before me as a dramaturg. But I got the first page after that. Yeah, yeah, you did. So you were a pioneer. So I know you were once called to court. You had to go to a court in New York City. And not that you had done anything wrong, but you were an expert witness. Lynn Thompson, the dramaturg we also know, worked on Ren Jonathan Larson's and she was left out. She said, that's not right. And it went to Broadway. I think I should be in there. And so I think the judge said, and then it means it's serious. And of course it's about money. When things get serious also in America in that sense. So the judge said, you know, does anyone know what a dramaturg is? What is a dramaturg? Well, my brother who is an MIT grad who works in alternative energy and is about as far from dramaturgy as you can possibly get emailed me about a month ago that he got a tweet from a guy I'd never heard of whose name is Thomas M. Nichols, N-I-C-H-O-L-S. I went on his incredibly extensive Amazon page. You're all welcome to go on it, N-I-C-H-O-L-S. I mean, dozens of books where it says that Tom Nichols is a professor of national security affairs at the US Naval War College, a columnist for USA Today and a contributing writer of the Atlantic. He is the author of The Death of Expertise, Oxford University Press, 2017, as well as books about Russia, the Cold War, Nuclear Weapons and the Future of Armed Conflict. An instructor at the Harvard Extension School and an adjunct professor at the US Air Force School of Strategic Force Studies. He's a former aide in the US Senate, has been a fellow of the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard and was named one of Politico's magazines, Politico 500, the thinkers whose ideas are shaking up American public politics and public life. He is also a five-time undefeated Jeopardy champion. Jeopardy has an exclamation point on it and is listed in the Jeopardy Hall of Fame and as one of the game's top players was invited to participate in the 2005 ultimate tournament of champions where he played his final match. So Tom M. Nichols, my brother says to me, tweeted, quote, so whatever a drama trick is, it's not a Jeopardy skill. So my brother added, for someone as policy-oriented as he is, and he has a very large following, half a million people on Twitter, after he texted this, he got a dozen quick replies from people who knew a drama trick, were a drama trick and suggested he dropped the E at the end because he had spelled it wrong. And my brother continued, since Nichols was an undefeated Jeopardy champion, he's making some kind of ironic reference to the boundaries of knowledge. Dronatorgy was outside that boundary and maybe your writing will help move it. So I sent him and his half million Twitter followers a screenshot of your Amazon page of your book. So I tracked this back and it turns out that actually this all happened because a grad student from California majoring in dramaturgy was on Jeopardy for one night. And that's how the word came to the consciousness of Tom Nichols at the Naval War College. So you're absolutely right, it's outside the boundaries of common knowledge in the, certainly in the United States. So the answer is no. But the more interesting answer is definitely yes, definitely both in the theater and in the academic community. And it's turning out to be quite interesting to the publishing community who do the sort of the same similar work with authors on the page without the fun of backstage life. And that's why my website is about backstage. The work of Dramatrix has a lot to do, a lot of similarities with the work of editors working with books. And as you know, since you've read the book, there's quite a bit about editing and how to handle authors, especially authors that are great authors that are pushing the boundaries of what work is. So that is also included in our work. But I think the fact that dramaturgy is not well known is actually the best thing about it. It's a good thing. The title of my book, The Art of Dramaturgy was actually not my suggestion, but I've grown to like it quite a bit. And I like the fact that on the cover, the cover design I like very much, the word appears three times. You just can't get away from it. There it is in big letters. And it's an odd word. And the tasks that stand behind it are complex and they require a lot of skills, training and an instinct for making theater. And it's not something that many people can do or do well. Just like playwriting isn't something that many people can do or to do well. But unlike playwriting, I want the profession to retain its mystery and its lack of renown in the outside world. And in a way that is its glory. I can't tell you the number of times that I've come out from the dressing rooms with the actors at the end of the show on opening night and have had my sleeve discreetly pulled by the press handlers and have been asked, could you please step out of the picture? And I'm always happy to step out of the picture and give the focus to the people who deserve to be in the picture. So now that the book exists in the real world and I'm no longer writing it, thank God, odd details have become very resonant to me. For example, the epigraph. That's, I learned when I started the book, that's the thing that comes at the very beginning of the book that sort of gives you the overall impetus for the book. And I'm gonna read it to you. It's very short, it's a paragraph. It was a toast to a dramaturge in Europe on his 60th birthday in 1962. And here's the quote, here's the toast. There is no more serious praise for an artistically, intellectually creative person than when you can say of him, his contributions evident to all precisely known, clearly visible to his collaborators were accomplished with personal anonymity. This does not mean that his personality or his personal life is colorless or without contours, but it means that he was able to funnel all of this color and contour into his life's work. And in doing so, render his personality equally transparent behind it. Characteristics that defined to a great degree the essence and effectiveness of the successfully practicing dramaturge. That's the toast to Kurt Hirschfeld of the Zurich Schauspielhaus on his 60th birthday. Kurt Hirschfeld is somebody I had never heard of. And actually, Frank, you were involved in this when I heard about him for the first time because I got an invitation to come to an institution I had never heard of, of a very beautiful Think Tank Museum Conversation Center in the village about a decade ago, the Leo Beck Institute, devoted to the preservation of the contribution of German speaking Jews. And they wanted somebody who was a dramaturge, so that's always me to come down and talk about what that was. And I found out about this guy, Kurt Hirschfeld, who I, to my horror, had never heard of before, who was the dramaturge of the Zurich Schauspielhaus. And everything that I have done in my life, some of which is documented in this book, is nothing compared to what Kurt Hirschfeld did in his life. Escaping Germany in 1933, again, he was Jewish. That was a good time to get out. Successfully getting the dramaturge job at the German speaking Zurich Schauspielhaus. There weren't a lot of Germans speaking places in Europe, which was run by an artistic director devoted to operettas and light entertainment. Little did he know who he had hired. So Hirschfeld talked his boss into hiring a permanent acting company. And then despite the danger of his own ethnicity, et cetera, he made repeated trips during the 1930s back into Germany, where he rescued some of Germany's greatest actors. And let's just start with the original Mother Courage, Theresa Gehring, all Jewish, who would most certainly, without his aid, have perished in the camps. But they had a job offer. And he took them to Switzerland and they all survived the war. And then he introduced to his bewildered artistic director what is essentially today the modern European repertory. T.S. Eliot, O'Neill, Lorica, Wilder, O'Casey to a continent where censorship by that point was absolute. Spain, Italy under Mussolini, Vichy France. And as I was writing this out earlier today, I wanted to say, let's stop when I say Vichy France and tip our hats to the great Louis Chouvet, who took his superb Comedy Française acting company out of Paris. The night the Germans occupied the city and he took them as a vagabond troop, just like Hamlet's players who come to Elsinore, he took them to South America and refused to perform in an occupied city. And they played this ragtag band of the greatest French players of their time in South America, a Spanish-speaking continent, a Portuguese-speaking continent, until the day that Paris was liberated, when this great company returned and they were there when de Gaulle came in and the Comedy Française reopened at that time. He said the Comedy Française will never perform in an occupied city. Back to Khrushchevil, Scandinavia was overrun by the Nazis, the lowlands, Russia, all, everything invaded by Hitler. I always wondered why Brecht went back to Zurich the morning after his Huak hearing. Why didn't he go back to Berlin where he was from? But he went back to Khrushchevil, who had been the only person to produce his plays from 1933 when his books were burned until his return in 1948. It's a long time to be without income. And he produced many of his plays, including the World Premiere of Mother Courage. But that's not the end of Hirschfeld's contributions. He looked around just now for new writers to encourage, to write for the stage, and he found two local guys, one of whom went on to win the Nobel Prize. Both were Swiss, Max Frisch and Friedrich Durandmacht. And the range of their works includes highly topical political work as well as more traditional fair, the great allegory of fascism in Frisch's play, The Firebugs. Durandmacht's The Visit of the Old Lady and Andorra, which is a wonderful play about an adopted child who everyone including himself thinks is Jewish, but at the close he turns out not to be. And then Kurt Hirschfeld vanishes from history, even from my understanding, living on only in the memories of the great artists he supported, as it should be. Yeah, it's really a stunning story and so deeply connected. And you are right. He called, I think, Frisch and Durandmacht, they were writers or journalists. He said, this is a very interesting story why don't you write a play? I mean, that's sensational. Why it was functional also, it was a private theater. Actually, he was taken out of the Swiss, I think, organization of theaters and writers. He also brought people from France, Camus, Sartre, they were like the enemies in a way. Switzerland was neutral, but not really. They also were very deeply involved in persecution, in a way or some of them were Jewish and didn't let as much in as they could have. So it is truly remarkable. And I think it's a great model and you point that out so rightfully. What is a dramaturg? This guy was a dramaturg and he directed but also gave space and in a time when it was important to me. Somebody said to him, would you just step out of the picture? I mean, I thought to myself last night, did he really produce the world premiere of Mother Courage? Yes, he did with Theresa Gearing. I checked it on Wikipedia, but on Wikipedia, it says that the play was done for the first world premiere was under the aegis of the artistic director. Kurt Hirschfeld has not mentioned. He's not mentioned yet. Theresa Gearing, she was the great mother of mother animal but she was a national treasure. And as you say, not only he got her on stage, she got one of the greatest plays, most significant plays in theater history. He also saved her life. And in your book, as you said, you talk about 10 examples, I'm just gonna quote some of them. The Wendy Wasserstein, which was a contemporary play about women, a new one. You had Tom Stoppard, the coast of utopia, a new work that looked back in the history of Russia. It's inspired by the great Isayah Boland book on Russian writers. You had the Orphans of South, which was what you said, cross-cultural international work. You had the mule bone, the kind of the African-American experience with Sir Daniel Hurston and Langston Hughes. You had Seraphina, which was the South African experience. You did the Midsummer Night's Dream, which you write so beautiful about and I wish I had seen that work. They are so radically different, almost like actors going into different roles. Your friend, Meryl Streep, who you're studying with, who slips into different works. So, and you were successful with these pieces. You and Robert Wilson's Hamlet Machine, of course, also is in there. What is success? What does success mean? What is successful? How do you define success of a dramaturg? Well, I think the answer is very much like what makes a successful director or an actor or successful designer in the theater. You need to have a great deal of information about the theater. It's past as well as it's present. As well as a wider life in the world with an interest in other art forms as well as an interest in current events. You can't just be stuck in the theater. You have to have a life at the same time. And you need to have that famous collaborative gene like a good actor has with a thousand ideas. A good actor comes in after doing all of his or her prep work and says in a rehearsal, I've heard this a million times. What if I try X when I say this line? And a good director will say, go ahead. And it might be right and it's often wrong. Then the actor will have a second choice. What if I try this? And each one of those choices will illuminate something. If they're wrong, they'll illuminate something. And if they're right, they'll illuminate something. And all the ones that are rejected and most of them will be rejected. And I make a point of that in my book. I always come up with about a hundred things for every project. 99 are usually rejected, but nobody takes it amid. Like an actor doesn't say, oh, you didn't like that. The actor will say, I have another idea. Let me try that. So it's that openness to have a lot of ideas and to be open to the collaboration of just continuing to add to the rich stew of the rehearsal room that is really, really important. You have to have a range of interesting, new, intriguing information for your director and for your company. And again, be prepared for most of it not to be used. Just like the actors, what if I try will ultimately not be used, but shed a lot of light on things. If your nose is pulled out of joint easily or if you see only one or two ways ahead, it's not a job for you. The flexibility and the instinct for collaboration are really very, very important. Personally, I think theater has always been kind of like a tribe of outsiders. And when you get to know it's workings, you either belong or you don't. I personally, now that I look back after writing this book, I regret in a way that theater training has moved away from conservatories attached to theaters where young people, and that was fortunate to happen to myself, absorb its customs, its ways of working, its traditions, everything in theaters handed down by actors. And you pick that up if you're on book in a rehearsal or you're sewing costumes or you just generally get a sense of how a theater collaboration works as well as all the information that comes along with that. Now it happens in colleges, where many people who perhaps took jobs because they couldn't succeed in the profession have found refuge. It is not an easy life being in theater. You can look where theater people stand in the Renaissance Great Chain of Being or the ancient Chinese social ranking chart. They are right above tooth pullers in the social hierarchy. Molière might've had dinner with the king at Versailles, but a month later, he was pulling a cart with the rest of his company in rural France. And when the great 19th century stage idol, Edwin Booth died, his home is now the Players Club on Gramercy Park, one of the great townhouses left in New York City. His heirs went to his parish, St. Bartholomew's on Park Avenue, to arrange his burial. And we're told, this is the 1880s. We don't bury actors, unfortunately, but there's a little church around the corner that does. And that church is still there on 29th Street. It's called The Little Church Around the Corner and it's stained glass windows depict the great actors of the 19th century. Right next to the Grat Center actually, right in such a cune, yeah. But you go in, it's beautiful. I do, yeah. But on the other hand, the players pulling up at Elsinore Castle in Hamlet, they're regular theaters, probably like Shakespeare's, closed because of the plague. So here they are on the road again. But you can see how Hamlet greets them as his equals. I've watched a number of brilliant, really brilliant actors leave the profession because they just could not take the uncertain lifestyle. And frankly, nowadays, I believe more and more that you can't enter the theater with debt. I didn't, and I thank God I didn't have any. I could, because I could have never paid it off, I would have had to leave theater as so many actors and directors now do and go straight into other professions, TV, movies, commercials. So I think that sense of its outsider nature gives it its freedom, gives it its collaboration and potentially its greatness. Yeah, that is, these are significant thoughts and we have to let it digest and listen to it again and read the book. I think you are so very, very right. And then within the hierarchy of theater people, then the drama talk is also on the bottom of the totem pole and the closest to the prostitutes and the tooth pickers, as you said, and the tooth pullers at the time. But I think it's gaining, it's the significance of the drama talk. I once had a discussion at the Seagulls and about drama talk, I had run some circles about in one of the directors, I think it was one of the men who said, well, if a director is so stupid and can't read a play and needs someone else to explain it, I would never hire the director. And I said, you know, the great director, Peter Stein from the show, if he doesn't have three, actually he insisted, three of the top dramaturgs in his rooms, I'm not gonna start even rehearsing. Yeah, I mean. And you turned out, we said that Joe Pap didn't know what a dramaturg is in Europe or Germany, you quote lessing, it goes back to the 17th century or 18th century was lessing. So yeah, so there are worlds that are colliding, but the theater is better for it. This is what it's about the end result, but I interrupted you. Well, I mean, and that was my initial outing with Joe. And I did four other shows in the park where he embraced me, he was very, very nice to me. So I think for many people, you know, it's just like, what is this? I mean, Livia Chule, another director from Romania, but who worked a lot here in the States, said, if you're climbing Mount Everest, why not take all the help you can get? So that's how I see it. If you're not threatened by people asking questions or suggesting ideas, take everybody along. You want actors who ask questions, you want actors with ideas. So it depends on your personality. We spoke about even Pina Bausch had a tramitor. She was a dancer, a choreographer, and Raymond Hogan, we talked about him as Bonnie Meranca. She interviewed him in a beautiful interview and timelines, you know, and she said, this is so significant. And I think it's getting more recognized, more important and because the work at the end is better for it, not because we like dramaturgs or we say, well, let's save the way, no, they make a real contribution. And at the very end, the result, the aesthetic result, as the way you produce, the way of production determines it. And if you have, as you say, a guide on your side climbing the mountains who has been there, who has, as you did with all the plays I mentioned, been on many mountains, you know, you would be like, Reinhold Messner, you have been most probably of all the Himalayas, mountains of theaters and you looked at them and you share with us a toolbox. The list of 100 facts I like that you talked about, you say, these are 100 kinds of random things what people saw, this lives, you know, that Bakunin was healed with animal magnetism, you know, and then ended up in jail, lost his teeth, but then wanted to be, meet long fellow, you know, the power desk, I don't know why it stuck in my mind. What does, you know, so there are hundreds of these things you put together, it is stunning. And what you do, I was very impressed when you said, and again, I mean, I believe you, I know you, you tell the truth, I read about 500 plays a year, I do write reports about plays, I keep track, I write notes, I have about 10,000 reports and play reading takes plays outside of his hours. Is that true? Yeah, and believe me, the reading load of a dramaturg is nothing compared to a reading load of an editor in a publishing house. Plays are much shorter than books. So I think that question is one that anyone who's watching this who's working and certainly in publishing is familiar with or film. I mean, I mentioned Annette Inzdorf. This is a great film expert scholar who has written notes to herself every time she's ever seen a film. Maybe she's seen it five times before, but she writes each time for 50 years, you know? So it's not a particularly odd thing to do, but it helps you keep track of a writer's development, it helps you keep track of your own feelings about a play or a subject or a writer that might change over time, which you might forget. So it's again, the one who remembers. You try and keep track of things and you get your reading skills up to speed. But again, you know, if you read a book like Bob Gottlieb's Avid Reader, which is his book about his memoir about being a editor, he would get a manuscript and he would, every time he got a manuscript, he would read it that night. It's stunning. I like also what you said about how you read a play, if you wanna talk about it a bit, you know, the notes you take and the question, so how do you read a play? Well, I think that's all outlined in the book. I mean, it's something that I tried to be very specific about, but it's very much the way that I read a play. It's not, I'm not holding it up as the way that everybody should be. But I'm holding up, just like my hundred interesting things about plays that no one's gonna do the Coast of Utopia. I wish they all would, but it just is too big a show. Same with Mealbone. I mean, cast of 28 in a band, who's gonna do that? Oh, you know, but I was trying to set a high bar. It's like, this is how many things you should find and 99% of them won't be interesting. But for the actors, and I've given many examples in the book, who found certain things really interesting, it was transformative to how they approached the part. And that's why the fun part of being a dramaturg is coming into a first rehearsal and having actors that you know run over and hug you because you've taken them higher in your own way. Even though you're a step out of the picture, you've given them something that they can use. That's what a dramaturg is. It's somebody who gives a creative artist a tool that they might not have known about. Yeah. And like you said, I look at it and say, what is the strengths of a play? This is your first question, not what's the weakness, what's wrong? Say, what is the strengths? And then you say, what are questions? You write down questions you have. And then you keep it in your phone and you say, most of them don't make it. And next to reading the 500 plays a year, the 10,000 in your career, you're also obsessed in finding the unproduced play, the play in an archive, the play no one has ever known about, but it's important, right? Yes, and also, and I have one other thing I want to answer before we come to an end, but the other thing too is that, and that's a good thing about having a title like drums where nobody knows what really it is, as I pointed out, it's not even guys on Twitter know what it is. You can kind of do whatever you want. I mean, so many things like, for example, the director's lab or the Lincoln Center Theater Review, which was founded, which was created by John Boyer, the Shinsai Project, which commemorated the first anniversary of the Tsunami or our new legacy playwrights initiative, which was created to recognize in very important successful writers, still alive, whose plays have won Tony Awards and been produced widely, but are forgotten. It's sort of like the Motown syndrome. Everybody loves those songs, but none of the artists were paid for them. So we created a project to remedy that. So you can look around, like with the director's lab, but to create something, there was nothing for directors. So that went on for 25 years. There are five sister labs in Los Angeles, Toronto, the Mediterranean lab, Australia, because it was such a resonant idea and everybody wanted to be together. Everybody brought with them traditions from Indonesia, from all kinds of South America, Africa, Russia, Europe. It was so interesting to have discussions between people who had absolutely never heard of this particular kind of theater in Southern India that this young woman was running. There was 800 year old tradition. I don't even participate once the labs get going. They do all the work, but I get the rewards. I had a wonderful, wonderful Russian director who wasn't sure how good his English was. The Russians and the Japanese always have the hardest time with the English. But after the second week, he came up to me and he said, I think I finally understand the United States. So I said, oh, okay. What's happening? And he said, it's not about ethnicity and it's not about geography. I think it's about an idea. This is a couple of years ago. I hope you're right. That's great. No, I like what you say. You look for what's missing, then you create it. I know you're also creating or working on a Vicky page with traces, all the geometrics that ever worked on a play. And I like the fact, which I read in the book, that you were upset that the New York Times didn't cover you said, let's do our own review, the Littles and the theater review. Every downtown theater says that, you know, and then you say, they don't cover us in a way, they should, and especially you pointed out, when once it came to international cross-cultural ones or, you know, the black theater of South Africa, they were not so, you felt it was not. Yeah. Well, I mean, I mean, again, when you face an obstacle, like, like the boy says in Piercant by Ibsen, go around. I mean, the Lincoln Center Review founded by John Boyer was founded when we were doing Seraphina, when we could get no one to cover the show. Well, we actually, it was before Seraphina, we did a couple of South African theater festivals before and then after Seraphina, which had moved to Broadway by that point. We simply, there was no interest in this. There was no interest in Wendy Wasserstein when she first started. We had a woman writing a play. I mean, that's not a bad thing. That's an obstacle and you can go around that obstacle. So it was John's idea, let's just print the news ourselves. So the first issue of the Lincoln Center Review was a whole about South African theater, but then it became an even more nuanced idea, and I'll just end with this, which is that theaters sometimes can be ghettoized into entertainment. It's fun to do, but the Lincoln Center Theater Review is written, it's comprised of articles by writers who are not in the theater. So we have, thanks to our fantastic editor, Alexis Garagliano and John, who's our executive editor, our designers, Andre Bishop, we have Margaret Atwood writing on Utopia. We have George Packard, Richard Ford. I mean, the piece, Cynthia, when we were doing Ivanov, we sent it to Cynthia Ozick and said, is this an anti-Semitic play? And we published her response. So we try to place the plays in a context of sort of the intellectual or maybe that sounds too grand, but the life of the city, not just in entertainment, but they exist in the larger world. It's a great model and you design it so beautifully, you print it, but actually every theater company, how Matterhouse Small, they could have the website, it's 15 bucks a year, and say, you also, you share the journey, information around it, create. What's the genuine charge at the U.S. theater? Yeah, I wish to. So, and I think your entire book is taking someone by the hand and say, look what I did. Someone who says, who built a house, a vineyard, and someone comes, who might say, I'm gonna do that the same. And you say, well, I built this here. Let me show you how I did it and how things work in my time, in my mountains. So, but do you have a twice? I mean, the book itself is such a toolbox and such a great testimony to your generation of theater makers, but do you have a twice? Do you have like a Rilke's letter to the young poet? That's such a great book. Yeah, do you have, is there a twice for the young dramaturg? Well, it's not gonna be as good as Rilke's, I'm telling you. It is, I think it is, your book is, yeah. That's a great book, everyone should read that. I did put most of it in the book, but I'm happy to answer that question. My advice is to aspiring dramaturgs, prepare and work very hard. This is not an easy job. Don't follow everyone else's opinions. See things freshly. Try and forge new paths. Create larger initiatives needed by the entire field, but first and foremost, keep the audience in mind, right in the very front of your mind, because there is no theater without audiences. And those audiences are your neighbors and your community and your friends, and no one will give them to you. You and the work that you and your colleagues create has to entice them. And I've spent my professional life working on some of the most difficult, new or previously obscure material there could possibly be. And all of them found avid, large, and highly appreciative audiences. And in this, I stand in a long line of dramaturgs. So the audience, we haven't talked about much, but they are, they complete the circle. The stage sends the particle to the audience and the audience magnifies it and sends it back. I took my sister two years, three years in to see Hamilton. I mean, I don't even know who was in the show, the eighth replacement pass. And 1,300 people stood up and said, we're immigrants, we get the job done. And she looked at me like, how do they know how to do this? And I'm like, that's the theater. For instance, in this, just to conclude, in this podcast, the press, the Allie Northie Press has generously given the Segal Center permission to accept excerpt my first chapter, which concerns a very interesting, really interesting early attempt to work with a very accessible Shakespeare play. Probably the most conventional thing in the whole book. And it was approached in an unconventional way, not surprising, and an attempt that was, by most measures, not successful, although it was a really interesting try. And one that pleased its audiences at the Delacorte and Central Park. And it was directed by the first time Shakespeare director, James Lapine. And one of the audience members who loved that production and came that summer was Stephen Sondheim. So you know that. And that production is how their long collaboration began. And later that year, they both came to the house to visit with my husband, Joe, a painter, and talk about art a few times. And they talked about serrat in particular. And soon Mandy Patinkin was coming down to pose for Joe. And he's a really good actor. And when Joe and I finally saw Sunday in the park, of course, Mandy had been watching Joe, just as closely as Joe had been watching Mandy. And there was my husband, portrayed with all his mannerisms, painting on stage, but in a costume. Yeah. Yeah, it is quite, as the French philosophers, a rezone, like the roots of a forest, as we now learned from three re-science, they're connected, minerals that are missing in one part of the forest are miraculously transported and shared. They talk to each other, at least trees of the same species grow, but their leaves don't meet, right? They kind of live, they go around. How can that be? There's form of an intelligence and this network. And I think you beautifully described that entire, the forest in itself of theater, which is the tree is what itself, but that's also the forest. And the tree goes back in time. I mean, the theater is handed down to us by actors, somebody who thinks they were the illegitimate son of Shakespeare, who happened to talk to somebody else, who happened to talk to somebody else. You can track all of that stuff back. You can take it with a grain of salt or not, depending on who you are. But it's a tradition that goes back and certainly in the English speaking theater, and obviously to the Greeks and Chinese theater, Indian theater, millennia. And that information is accessible to you. And you need to know how to find it. And some of it falls out of favor and you've gotta dig deep into archives. I have a whole section on Jane Bowles, who was a wonderful playwright, wife of Paul Bowles, forgotten avant-garde writer. I mean, not hard to find, but you've gotta go back in time. You've gotta look forward. You've gotta look around. Writers like Sarah Rule or Bruce Norris or David Raib or people who are working today and be there for them. I mean, so it's such an interesting job because you're always doing something else. And the director's lab is just icing on the cake. So thank you for letting me talk about all this stuff. Yeah, but listen, we are not done yet. Tell us a little bit. If I'm not mistaken, you did not grow up as the daughter of university professors who were both Shakespeare experts and historians. Tell us a bit, where do you come from? Well, I mean, I actually, it's funny. One of the best things we ever published in the Lincoln Center Theater Review was an article by George Packer, who as you know, is a writer on politics, great writer on politics, many authors of books. He went to my high school. We went to public school in California together. He's a little bit younger than I am. And I owe a great deal of my life to the California public school system and just reading a lot. What you're getting at, I mean, if you know about me, is I mean, both my parents were educated, but my mother was a rodeo queen. So I have a whole ranching background. If the electricity went out right now, I would be just fine. I know how to cook on a wood fire. Yeah, you said that you would grow up with horses, right? And in ranches or your family had ranches. They are basically John Wayne country. I just was looking at the, oh my God, it just went out of my head. What's the name of this Benedict Cumberback movie that's just the power of the dog? And there's fabulous, he's so handsome, pictures of him on a horse. And all I could see is the fact that he's holding the reins in a way that my grandfather would have said, don't ever hold the reins like that because if a horse just takes a bit in his teeth, your little finger's gonna get pulled off your hand. So I do have that sort of strange ranching background that I can't do. But also your parents who said, go to a school in Germany. I think even in high school, they sent you over there. Yeah, yeah, yeah. You went to Paris? Yeah, I've been reading a whole bunch of things about W.G. Sable, who was in that time in the early 60s. And it might as well have been not the medieval period, but I mean, it was very, very old school. And I was in Karlsruhe in the late 60s. And we have a four year overlap, but it was really a very different time. You couldn't watch a movie in Germany in English. All the movies in English were dubbed into German. It was very provincial in some regards. Yeah, it was the same voices, whether it was Gary Cooper or John Wayne. You experienced March 68 in Paris, right? Did that was that important to you or was it too far removed from your life experience? No, no, I mean, I was involved in a lot of that stuff. And I had come from the Bay Area, obviously during protests against Vietnam War and the beginnings of the women's movement, which I covered for a radio station that I was working for. I mean, it's scary to be in a civil disturbance. I mean, it's dangerous, it's scary. The only incident I'll tell you was that I had some, I had a circle, small circle of friends in Paris, among them a guy who was, American guy was pretty well connected, who was a friend of the Time Magazine Stringer. And the reporter asked me, could I come with you and go to a demonstration? And I thought, oh my God, if Time Magazine is relying on me to get them to, we're in trouble. Yeah, that's quite something. And then you went on in San Francisco, the great ACT, we had Carrie with that prologue. You worked there. And I liked that. You wrote about theater, you had a weekly review in a way, you started even else as a theater critic. And I liked, you said, I worked in the costume shop, to make some money. So they said it gave me an idea of that, you quote, Andrea Bishop, of that big team effort, what theater is. So you created the costumes or you were repairing them or what did you do? If you grow up without electricity and running water, you learn how to sew. And you learn how to sew on a non-electric machine, which you run with federal. So I know how to sew. An old singer, yeah. If the lights go out, I can take care of your clothing needs. But also, of course, you learn immediately that the best place to be is with your head down in a costume shop, because you learn everything about what's going on in the theater, because the costume shop knows everything. So I learned that very early on. In other words, my point with ACT, which was, of course, great, great old theater company in the tradition of the English companies from centuries before, run by William Ball, Ellis Raab was director and residence. It was an actual acting company. And you absorbed the history and traditions that had been handed down from the time of Shakespeare. And that just would naturally come up in rehearsals as you were holding the book where you were sewing, doing piecework in the back. I mean, I was given the lowest level job. I just did piecework. I was not allowed to touch anything that, you know, more important than that, because of course, I wasn't as skilled as everyone else working. That was a very demanding costume shop. But being part of that community was really an education in itself and a wonderful one. And I owe that to, you know, the American tradition, which is unfortunately gone by the wayside. They were theater companies. Adrian Hall had a theater company. Garland Wright had a theater company. Zelda Fitchhander had a company. You know, I mean, there were many companies around the country that kept that tradition alive and now financially is no longer possible. And I would love to see that tradition started maybe on a smaller scale in many of the vibrant theaters outside of New York that need to come back, to fit into their communities, to work with boards of directors. That's a big thing that if I were 30 years younger, I would put my brain to doing. I love the idea of democratizing theater, having it be more about what's going on in communities, not be so New York-centric, although of course, New York is the great capital of theater. But there's also, and there has been in the past, stuff going on everywhere in the States. So that's something that is an initiative that would be great for a young person to do. Yeah. And you also were at a university at the Briarcliffe College in the theater department. You found out you were paid a third of your male colleagues, did everything, and you left. You were six years freelancing, doing all these things, the translation project, LMDA till, you know who, Gregory Mosho, who you know you a little bit before, but you know, I think you met him while you were giving out flyers. Yeah, in a subway, right? You can always keep it in the public way. Yeah, but yeah, yeah, that's how you got in great. Also, do you know, as a great, as a great connector in the Americans here. Just to end this, I mean, I think that's why I said before, it's important to remember that the theater really is a kind of an outsider's life. I mean, the fact that James LePine was courageous enough and had these brilliant ideas to do a first time Shakespeare in Central Park, that's a huge undertaking. And I happened to know him, and I describe in the book why I knew him because I was one of the few people who went up to see what he was unknown person was doing, and he remembered that. And then in the course of doing it, and some of it was very good, and some of it wasn't so good, this guy came to see it, Steven Sondheim. And look at how James LePine's career changed as a result of that one night. And so me handing out brochures is just a pretty common thing in the theater, just like an actor will go up for an audition and say, I feel I'm totally right for this part, doesn't get it, and then just says screw it, didn't work out, and goes to the second audition and gets the part and becomes, you know, the Tony Award winner. I mean, that's the life of a theater person. Because it's really, it's something alive, it's something organic, that's why it's different from other fields. I like when you said, you know, the custom shop knows, you often quote, you know, the ushers of the second balcony, you know, they are the ones who tell you things, the casting director, the lighting designer, you listen to them, you know, that is of importance and what they say. I like when you said, how do you start apply? I mean, first, or you quote someone who said, well, I go at my own, I do dinners for a couple of nights where we eat, and then we read line by line, but an entire week long, you know, so it is something I like when you quoted at universities, you said the only place where students, you know, kind of exchange, collaborate, a diverse, is in sports and in theater. Yeah, yeah. You know, so it says something about the field. Yeah, because you have to, you have to be a community and you have to, you have your job, someone else has a different job, but if someone else is, you know, needs you or has a moment of faltering, you can help out. I mean, that's what sports teams do. That's what theater people do. And it takes a certain kind of personality to be generous enough to be able to do that. And it's its own reward. It's a wonderful thing to work, so to work happily in a group. And that's not just the people on the stage, that's the people backstage, that's the dressers, that's the crews, that's the ushers. I mean, everybody works together. It's a very large constituent. Just like a football team or a baseball team, the trainers, the physical therapists, the, what goes on in the locker room, it's a whole community that's supporting the star players who were out there throwing pigeons or batting. So those are the similarities. Yeah, and I was also surprised, but I shouldn't have been surprised, but still in that big forest of theater where the plays and players are the trees, but in the history of it, you also had a strong downtown connection. I read about Spaulding Gray, Maria Rinfornes, Ethel Eichelberger, David Greenspan, Nicky Paraiso, who you involve. How important was that to you? Or is that to you? I don't think I actually perceived a dichotomy between uptown and downtown. I just was interested in all kinds of things. And, you know, I mean, discovering Richard Foreman, I mean, it was impossible to get tickets to a Richard Foreman play. The theater was small. You had to, you know, you would be lucky to get a ticket. It would be three weeks away or early Bob Wilson things, they were hard to get into. I mean, there were just a lot of peanut vouchers, a lot of interesting stuff going on. I was also fanatically interested in Wendy Wasserstein. I was really interested in Chris Durang. I mean, there were just Mustafa Mathura, my God. I mean, I don't know that I categorized it as uptown, downtown. I just categorized it as interesting new ways of making theater. One question. Why isn't Claes, you haven't mentioned him? I know you're a big fan of him. He is not mentioned in the book, the German. I actually got a grant from Joe Papp. He was nice, very nice to me to translate a Claes play. He wanted to do it, but I'm a big fan. And I have a, I think a take on him. He's a very strange, very famous, of course, brilliant playwright who died in the early 1800s, committed suicide and is a classic German writer. But I think he's a more modern writer and could be appreciated more now. We all know him only in a way in America because of, Ragtime. Yeah, because of Ragtime. And the central character of Ragtime is Cole House Walker, who has his car ruined up on Fifth Avenue. And of course, this is based on a book by Heinrich von Kass called Michael Cole House and Doctor O acknowledged that the plot of that book was taken from this great, great, great novella, Michael Cole House. So I'm thinking about maybe writing something about the least popular, that's always me. If everyone's standing in a line behind the most popular person, then you go over and stand and start a line behind the least popular person. So that's my plan. If I have, it can recover my brain capacity after writing this book. Incredible. I think, yeah. And I hope we didn't give away too much from the book. There are so many more insights in there, twice actually how to work with writers, directors, how to approach plays, how to read plays, that complex process. My wonderful collaboration with Taj Mahal, that was one of the highlights of my life, working on mule bone. That was just a- Yeah, tell a bit, maybe, yeah. Well, again, it's pretty much chronicled in the book, but that was- It's important to tell us a bit. Also, your outreach, I mean, it's sensational what you guys did. I mean, that was a play that ended up having a successful Broadway run, 20-week run, to sold out houses of entirely African-American audiences with no coverage in any major New York paper. So it was mule bone, you know? And you found it at Professor Gates, right? Found it in the archive. Tell us, yeah. Well, I don't wanna give away. Henry Lewis Gates found this play. I didn't find it, of course. And he found the manuscript. There were two manuscript copies. It was a play that was the only collaboration between these two great writers of the Harlem Renaissance. And this was at a time, it's hard to believe I'm that old, when no one had ever heard of Zora Neale Hurston. And so Skip Gates decided, screw it, I'm getting Zora Neale Hurston back in print. So he got Random House to issue every single one of her books, which he used to teach from the Xerox copies of her books, because her family had thrown all of her manuscripts away. Anyway, he found this collaboration that had never been produced. And when I read it, I was very interested in Langston Hughes, who I adore. And I was very interested in Zora Hurston, who had been a member of John Houseman's and Orson Welles Federal Theater Project. There's a lost, I can't give you all the great notes of my book, but there's a lost Zora Hurston play that somebody who reads my book can find, but Skip had sent this to Gregory. And when I saw it, I said, we have to do this play. So we did. Cast of 28 Band and Taj Mahal did the music. Incredible. And it all impressed with me. And I stayed in touch with them for about 20 years afterwards. So he was always mad at me that I never made him buy a show jacket. If you have a show on Broadway, this is a secret for insiders, used to be that you could order for, it was very expensive, but you could order a show jacket made out of leather. And the back of the jacket said mule bone. And the front over your heart said Annie. And it had leather sleeve, like a motorcycle jacket. So we all had our mule bone jackets. And Taj didn't order one. And when I saw him like five years later or something, I ran into him somewhere and he said, why didn't you make me buy a jacket? Cause he's like, you know, six foot six. You know, he's a huge guy. I could have really made an entrance. I was really wearing a mule bone jacket. So I said, I didn't know who he had. No, I was very impressed. Also the very serious outreach to the community, African American, where you said, no one, we don't do these plays because the audience don't come. You made it happen also with Seraphina. I think it is stunning. I also have a high respect for your check-off project, which in a way is your project. It's your evening, you're the creator. Someone said find a play which we can use. I think it was Gregory too. And you said, you know, why don't we have a look at the stories and then you didn't just take the check-off source, but you know, you ask writers to, to in a way and that idea of sur la réalité, something on top, a layer, a collage, reacting to these stories, it went to 70 cities. Is that true or across the US? And it's a stunning work, also an idea what a dramaturg can do and create. The acting company was during my years of unemployment when I was freelancing for many different companies. But the acting company toured around the country. And so this project was a production of the acting company, was directed by Robert Falls of the Goodman Theater, were great friends. And so it went all over the country to 40 cities. It was quite an interesting experience to be part of that. And then it went to London and it was very successful because the shows were so good. And you see them now all the time as audition pieces because they're individual one acts. And Irene's play, Drowning, was just made into an opera, a little tiny opera by Philip Glass, which Joanne Eliza's directing was at Madden Mines and it's going to be under the radar. So it had its own life and it was part of a trilogy that Lila Neugerbauer directed a couple of years ago. So they've had continued lives of their own, but I'd like to do it again at some point, but the acting company doesn't have the strength to tour as big as it did back then. Great, maybe in the time of Corona, maybe there will be the traveling shows, the push cards. Who knows, we'll come up and really, we covered a lot of ground. Thank you so very, very much. I like you also discuss Ustamaya's term of the capitalist realism and the regi theater. It's a very interesting discussion where he said, we have to be aware of what it means and we shouldn't have the capitalist realism. You know, it was next to the socialist realism. It's a very interesting term and yeah. I don't want to go on too long, but there are three chapters devoted to this idea which I really wanted to put in the book because I was afraid that it would vanish from the world at least here, which is how to interpret a classical play which is say to honor the play, to find a play of great depth, of great power, of great complexity. So Siren is going by my ass. And then to find your way through it in a way that makes it very relevant, that makes it very relevant. And there are directors that you know and I know who are able to do this. And then I did this in two chapters. One, an unsuccessful attempt, one a successful attempt. And then I finished the book with the idea that you can take, there are plays that are so great that you can interpret them once successfully and then you can go back 20 years later and find a whole other way through them. That's right there. Yeah, and be careful. You know, it's not the easiest. Trump as Julius Caesar or Stalin is. You know, this is where we have to be careful. I think it's, it is really fantastic. I also like what you said, write the horse in the direction it's going. If you work with the classic, you know, or you quote someone, you know, that's something important in the idea of what you kind of put out the seat of the unconscious. What you say in the early, especially in the early years of a director, they seem to be connected. Lapine and the Jungian play, which you saw when nobody went, he wrote you, you went, nobody else from the theater went, but you saw his early work on Jung, not a successful play you said, but you could see a mind working. Interesting ideas was, you know, the Jungian Freudian discussion about that. You know, and Jung said, I dreamt about a child. And as Freud said, you are attacking me and you wish that I would be dead. It's fair to me as it was the end of their relation to never talk to each other after this. So that idea of the unconscious that you also wouldn't. So it's a real incredible museum thrift shop home depot for dramaturgs and there's lots of aisles and tools. And it's just really a stunning book. I'm glad you got it down. I'm glad that Corona Time helped you to do it. I can only imagine the poor fact checkers who had to work through this and to get everything done and how complicated that was. But really congratulation our highest respect for everybody who does a book. I think Jackie Kennedy said, if you only do one book in your life, your life has meaning, you know? So next to all the stuff you did, this is a fantastic thing. You really are a role model. You're close to your idol Hirschfeld and he would be so proud of what you did and their contribution. And also with the director's lab and the daily emails coming in, organizing. I want everybody to think about as a year long job just to say, organize a director's lab with 60 participants from all five continents. You know, that would take up your lifetime. And I cannot believe all the stuff you're getting done. But it's, you quote Goethe say, you know, what do we love drives our lives. And I think clearly your love for the theater, for community, for society and to make it a better place. It shines through though clearly in dramaturgs I think are of such significance because they are the one who really see the entire forest and not just the trees or the branches or the leaves. And so thank you very much. It's our rule set and as a professional question asker, a professional illuminator is so credit get fly. So thank you that we got a little glimpse into the mind and the brain and look under the hood of an Catania. So this was our talk about the art of dramaturgy as Anne said, from all of our book talks, one chapter of the writers actually is online, is on a Google drive. You can get it for free. It's incredibly generous. All the publishers and the writers next Monday with us will be Anne Bogart, such a significant American director, highly influential and important. And she will talk about her discovery the art of resonance, the idea that your work has to resonate. And I'm curious. So I can't read the entire book because it's not fully out yet, but she shared a chapter. Then we have Avra, Cedrulopoulou and Frank Radatz and they will talk about staging 21st century tragedies, theater politics and the global crisis, the global crisis we are experiencing like Milo Rao, you know, people, how do you stage these tragedies, our contemporary tragedies and how is it connected to the classics? And then Aiko, the great Japanese born dancer who lives here in New York, Aiko, will talk about her book, A Body in Fukushima and going back, you know, to also your work, what you did with Japan. And she took, is a photographer late to 100 photos and shares essays about that experience, a body in a landscape that has been devastated for the next 800 years are the estimates. You cannot go in their towns that are decaying, their cows that are still going around. So it will be really important. Bonnie Meranka was with us about her writings, timelines. Teresa Smalek talked about Ron Water and the Wooster Group and his significant contribution. And Alexis Green and Emily Mann talked about the book, Emily Mann Rebel, artist of the American theater. And Carrie Perlop just was with us on Monday and talked about her love for Pinter and Stopport. You know, they were her mountains, her generation and she asked us, so this was my game. I like to play to solve the puzzle. What is your game? What playwrights do you like? Let me, let's talk, you know, but this is what I did. And the same is here with Anne. So really, thank you, thank you. Most of the books talks come out directly out of the sequel talks that people, like you said, I'm writing this book, everything is closed. We cannot have any book talks and let's talk about the book. And I said, sure, this is a fantastic idea. So it's a big honor for us to be just at the very end and to have the espresso and cappuccino and not growing the potatoes and cooking the meals, getting it from the farm and the restaurant. And then we just get to hear, to listen to you. And I think really do go to your local bookstore, go to the drama bookshop and get the book. And there's something in there that might change your life. As Anne pointed out, that's why we do like art. So thanks to HowlRound for hosting us. DJ Thia, it is so important for us and we're really deeply grateful for them. Andy Tanby and Cactus Juice, those are some of them in India who are supporting us. So in the hope to hear you again, thanks to our listeners to take time out. This is important and Katana's work is important. Her book is important. And so thank you for listening and when she is sharing her experience of her work and life. And see you soon, I hope. And thank you to everybody, stay safe. And I hope that uncertainty which Anne talked on the beginning, it's gonna stay with us for a while. And this is one of the attempts to create meaning and to understand better who we are, where we come from and where we are going to. Thank you.