 We'll hopefully be tweeting questions, so it wouldn't be fair to ask you to turn your phones off if other people are using their phones. Spence will be conducting the interview, and there will be questions after. So if you do have a question, please make sure you speak loudly so our online audience can hear your question as well. Without further ado, it's my pleasure to introduce Spence Porter from Harvard Wood. Hi, everybody. OK, our guest tonight has been a major force in the American theater for more than three decades. He spent six years as a literary manager of Playwrights Horizons, then a decade as the artistic director of Playwrights Horizons, where among a long, long list of notable shows, he produced a few that you may have heard of. Some of you may know of Sunday in the Park with George or The Heidi Chronicles or Driving Miss Daisy, a vaguely familiar title. And then he moved on to the Lincoln Center Theater, where he's been artistic director since 1992 and producing artistic director since 2013. And the list at Lincoln Center is mind-bogglingly long and impressive. Plays by Tom Stoppard like Arcadia, The Coast of Utopia, The Invention of Love, Wendy Wasserstein's The Sisters Rosenzweig, other Wendy Wasserstein plays, Contact, Revivals like South Pacific, various Shakespeare plays, Henry IV, King Lear. It just is an amazing list of achievements. And let's welcome Andre Bishop. Thank you. I feel about 150 years old. It's sort of amazing that you're not given all that you've accomplished. It's even more amazing that you don't look as if you're 150 years old after doing all that. Somebody, I was having lunch with an agent, a literary agent last week. And they took a picture of me in a restaurant. And I thought, well, everyone takes photos now. And he didn't tell me that he was putting this photo on Facebook. So to my horror, I got all these emails from people about this photo on Facebook. Some of them were nice. But one of them, from a woman who's a director, whom I had not seen in about 35 years and who had not seen me in about 35 years. She wrote in, God, how did Andre Bishop get so old? This really makes me feel great. Anyway, you're supposed to tell people you're posting your photo on Facebook. But this person didn't. Well, continuing with the ancient history theme, I got an email from a Harvard classmate yesterday in which he asked me to let you know. This is Peter Kulik. He didn't sound like he knew you personally. But he asked me to let you know that he still has fond memories of you as Friar Lawrence. Oh, well, how lovely. Yes. And which sort of brings me to, so there was a phase when you did some acting. How I don't think it's very common for small children to dream of growing up to produce plays. Everybody wants to be a star, preferably, or at least the famous writer. How did you end up choosing, producing, as your own direction? Well, everyone's life in the theater is strange. And people come to the way they come, often through indirect methods. I think it's hard today because younger people in the theater think, oh, it's just life has to be one direct thing. And I'm here, and I want to get there, and this time I'm going to do it. But most people I know, and certainly my generation, it wasn't like that at all. I was born in New York. I lived in New York. And I had parents who were not in the theater, but they took me to the theater a lot from a very young age. And what we're doing, this stage adaptation of, I'm sure you've all read it, the greatest book ever written about the theater, Act One, by Mois Hart. And in the early pages of the book, he says that the theater is the refuge of the unhappy child. I think most of us can identify with that, too. And I was that. So I wanted to be in the theater. I wanted, like you said, to be an actor. And I did do a lot of acting at school and at Harvard and in summer stock, and a little bit off-roadway and on tour. And I did voiceovers. And I studied a lot with this great guy named Win Handman who used to run the American Place Theater. He was a great, great mentor of mine. And I was uncertain. I wasn't a bad actor. I mean, most people would say, oh, I was so terrible. But I actually was quite good. But I lacked confidence as an actor. I lacked the kind of confidence and ego you need to be an actor. And one of my many psychiatrists said that my problem in life was that I had trouble going from the shadows to the spotlight. And I loved being in the shadows. And I loved being in the spotlight. But getting from one to the other was virtually crippling for me. And that's not the kind of personality you want to have if you want to be an actor. So I was really, I think how I became a producer was simply by chance and by luck and by timing. I was aged all about 26 and quite determined to have a life in the theater, but uncertain about who I was and what I really wanted to do or how I wanted to do it. And I was unhappy. And a friend of mine from Harvard, a director, said to me, you know, we were having dinner. And I guess I hadn't seen him in a while. He said, you seem like you're a complete, you're not sort of together. And I'm beginning to direct at this very small, off-off Broadway theater called Playwrights Horizons. And there's this wonderful guy there named Bob Moss. And you should go talk to him. And maybe he'll have something for you to do. So I went and saw this guy, Bob Moss, who was just beginning that theater. There was no money. The move to 42nd Street had just begun. And Bob, being a very generous person, said, and also in desperate need of help, non-paying help, said, you know, well, what do you want to do? And I said, I have no idea what I want to do. And he said, well, why don't you just come here and hang out, or whatever the word was, in 1975? And so I did. And I answered phones. We only had one phone. And accompanied Bob, and I think one or two other staff people, to this old massage parlor on 42nd Street between 9th and 10th Avenues. And it was cheap. And it was sort of in the Broadway district. And the porn industry wasn't going very well. There were still prostitutes and a fair amount of massage parlors. And we moved into something called the Sex Institute of America. And we had very little money. And we just wrote everyone we knew for money, because we had been at the old YMCA on 55th Street. And we wrote people like Richard Rogers. And he didn't send us any money. But one day, we were sitting there, and this giant truck arrived with gallons of paint and Ajax and Mr. Clean and mops and grooms. And we somehow, I mean, it sounds like a Mickey and Judy movie, but we renovated very simply this theater. We started putting on plays. The mission of Playwrights Horizons then, as it is now, was to do new American writing. And in those days, we did a lot of very small productions of many plays, like 20 to 30 productions a year, on what was then called the Showcase Code. And I loved it there, and I had no duty there. And then, I can't remember what happened, but Bob got so busy that there were all these unopened in the days before computers. Manila envelopes from Playwrights. And nobody was reading these plays. And I was at a theater called Playwrights Horizons. So I said to Bob, Bob, do you think I could read some plays for you? And he said, sure. And then I said, do you think I could write a report? And he said, sure. So stupid, now. I mean, it seems so stupid. So that's what I did. And I became, simply by default, one of the first literary managers in America. I mean, people didn't have dramaturgs and literary managers. And then I'm skipping over a number of years. We did a lot of plays. Most of them were pretty grim. But Bob was a great believer that opportunities create artists, and Playwrights Horizons in those days was a theater of infinite opportunity, mostly for playwrights, but by association directors and designers. So we grew a bit. And then Bob had this idea that I hated that we would have a theater in Queens in the old world's fairground. This theater thing in the round, which used to be a cyclorama thing. This is a really long-winded answer. But it's interesting, sort of. And he thought that because we didn't make any money in New York doing these new plays by mostly unknown writers, that we could have a subscription theater in Queens that would do classics where we would actually make money people would pay. I mean, in the early Playwrights Horizons days, Bob and then I used to get up in front of the audience and make a speech about how we're working here. And these are young writers. And the audience is the last element to come in after the lights. And we'd quote from Shakespeare. And it was just all perfectly dreadful. And at the end of the performance, we'd stand by the door with a big shopping bag and ask people to drop their money in. And eventually we stopped that because the average was about a dollar a person. And many other things were dropped into this. I guess we'll have to tell you. We were still on 46th Street. Anyway, the theater in Queens supported the theater in Manhattan for a while. And then there was some of you older people might remember the big gas crunch of, I've repressed when it was, but 1979 or 1980, something like that. And the subscribers to the Queens Theater in the park all drove because it was a big parking lot. And we lost at least 50% of the subscribers. We closed the theater. We had no money. And at that point, I was basically the artistic director of the Manhattan facility, where we had, as they have now, two theaters, a small theater and a larger theater. And Bob was exhausted from this, from the worry of it, from the constant struggle of it. And we went out to Long Island. We took a walk on the beach. And he said, look, I can't take this anymore. And we have two options. We can close the theater and say, we, he did. And then I joined him. We did really useful work for 10 years or so. We did a lot for a lot of artists. And no one, God has not come down from heaven to say, all these theater companies have to last forever, because many of the great ones, in fact, haven't lasted forever. And I think some of the ones now shouldn't last forever, if you want my opinion. Or he said, you can take it over and do whatever you want with it. But I'm out of here. And I thought about it, not for very long. And I thought, well, I might as well try. What's the harm? So what I did, well, and I didn't know what I was doing. My point in talking for five minutes about this is that I lucked out, because I happened to be at a stage in my life, which matched the stage of Playwrights Horizons in its life, which matched the stage of the nonprofit theater movement in its life. And I was just the right person at the right time. I mean, I was, you know, I worked hard. And I was good. But what happened to me could never happen today in quite the same way. Then I decided to focus the work of the theater on a specific group of writers that I was fond of and had cultivated, like Wendy Wasserstein and Krista Rang and William Finn and a number of others, Lupine and all that. And then, thank god, we did a couple of really successful shows in a row. And that put Playwrights Horizons on the map. And it also bailed us out financially so that we could actually survive. But all of my knowledge about, I never went to drama school except acting, class, private, you know, in New York, all of my knowledge of the business, the art, and the craft of producing was completely self-taught. I mean, if you had told me when I graduated from Harvard that I would be, have gone into the management end of the theater, much less work in the nonprofit theater, which I'd never heard of, I would have not known what you were talking about. So that was my path. Thank you. And so now we've got you to the point where you are, in fact, an artistic director. And I'm wondering, as one who has never been an artistic director, what exactly does an artistic director do? Let me make this a little easier to answer. Like, at any given moment, there are probably more than 1,000 possible great shows potentially out there. You are not yet in a position to do a season of 800 shows. How does that universe of possible shows get funneled down to a smaller group that actually reaches your desk? And then how does the decision get made about what a season is going to look like? Well, it's really quite easy. I don't mean the process of it is easy. The doing of it is quite hard. Producing is many, many things. And an artistic director of most of these nonprofit theaters does a lot more than just pick the plays and supervise the productions, though that is the main thing you do. But my fingers, and I dare say those of others who have the kind of job I have, we're into everything. Fundraising being, obviously, one of the principal things. I think producing is simply, I mean, this just sounds obvious, but it isn't so obvious maybe, is producing is simply the intelligent exercise of one's own taste. And at least that's what it is for me. I think that one has a feeling about a certain play. One has an intuition about how it might be done. One looks for certain things in writing that maybe someone else at a different theater does not look for. And you act on your impulse. I mean, sometimes I'm afraid to migrate detriment. I pay no attention. And I don't mean this to sound arrogant at all. I pay absolutely no attention to what the audience might or might not think about the play. I pay no attention to whether the play will sell well or not. I really couldn't care less, and I never have. I'm assuming that my, to use the word again, taste will appeal to somebody other than me. But I think when you get distracted by, well, will the audience, or as some people who run theaters say, well, my audience like this or that, it's just a trip to hell. It doesn't work. So there are obviously writers that I've worked with over the years, and that's the grand directors I've worked with over the years, that we all of us in these theaters have certain colleagues that we work with a lot because we like them and they like us. But more importantly, I think in terms of writers, we understand their writing and perhaps how to produce their work. And the greatest thing about getting older is the first day of rehearsal in a room full of actors and the designers and the staff. And there are always millions of people who come to the first day of rehearsal, what they call meet and greet. And the great thing for me now is to look around at people that I've worked with for years. I mean, we had meet and greet for Act 1 about, I don't know, two weeks ago it started. And I realized that I had worked with James Lapine since we produced a playwrights' horizons whose play called Table Settings in 1977. And we had Commission Sunday in the Park with George around 1982. So it's many, many years over many plays. And this is just one example. And here we are all these years later still at it, putting on shows. So the artistic director, I'm a great believer in one's own personal taste and one's own personal intuition. Someone else may not say that. But that's what it is for me. Now, for two decades you worked in tandem with Bernard Gerstin. Yes. How did that division of responsibilities work? Well, he was wonderful. I mean, he, for one thing, left me completely alone. And I could just do what I wanted. And he was supportive from a man. He was the management head. And he was the one, more than me, who said, yes, let's do this. Yes, we can do this. He made Lincoln Center Theater into what I call a theater of yes. And was the first one, despite the fact he was in charge of the money, to say, you know, let's risk this. Let's spend the money. Let's do as many shows as you want. So he was a great showman. I was very, very lucky at Lincoln Center and at Playwrights Horizons to have two wonderful management heads who were partners and enthusiasts and who didn't give a damn about the bottom line, even though they were in charge of the budget. And that's unusual. So again, I lucked out with Bernie Gerstin because part of the reason that Lincoln Center Theater, which some of you may know, had a very troubled past for many years and a number of managements until basically Bernie and Gregory Mosher and then me, you know, it was doomed. People, when Bernie and Gregory came there in 1980, I think it was around 86, the deal from Lincoln Center was it was about the fifth management. And the deal was if you can't make this work, we are going to either tear the theater down, turn it into a cineplex or an indoor ice skating rink and get rid of all the floors below it. I mean, because theater had never worked there. Lincoln Center was thought to be a music place, not a drama place. And it's turned out well. It has indeed. And also, I would say, in terms of picking plays, we are lucky enough and cursed enough to have two thrust stages. And believe me, thrust stages are harder to work with than proscenium stages. And people don't really understand that because usually we've used these stages very well with the right director and the right designers who know how to work in thrust. But not every play works well in a thrust theater. And quite frankly, the 50 to 75% of the great American plays of the past 100 years are basically small, realistic family dramas. And they don't really work that well in thrust theaters. So one of my duties is to find plays that are architecturally compatible. And that's a really serious thing. If you don't know how to use the Beaumont, how to use it and what do you put in it, you are really in trouble. The Beaumont is the biggest stage acreage, the third biggest theater after the Metropolitan Opera and Radio City, which doesn't mean you have to fill it full of scenery, but you have to fill it somehow. At the time you came to the Beaumont, you were right off of Playwrights Horizons where you were working with a very tiny stage. And as I remember, it's a percenium stage. So how was that adjustment for you? It was very, the adjustment was scary, I have to say. I didn't know what I was doing when I got to Lincoln Center. And it's just as well. I mean, I came there very easily. Again, I was lucky. And I really say that because I look back on my life and some of my friends. And Gregory Mosher left quite quickly after a few really excellent years. And I, to this day, don't really know why he decided to leave, but he did. And they had to find someone very quickly. And Bernie called me up one day at home and said, Gregory is leaving. I mean, I was friends with all of them because I'd worked for Bernie. I was the hapless and hopeless box office treasurer at the Delacorte Theater, one grisly summer. And Bernie said, Gregory is leaving. And I have a list of people who we're looking at to replace him. And it has to be done very quickly. And I'd like your opinion about all these people. So he, fine, he read me this list of mostly, in fact, exclusively directors. Because I had always felt that whoever was the artistic director of the Beaumont should be a director. And when they interviewed the entire world in New York to hire Gregory and Bernie, they interviewed me not for the job, but just, what did I think? And my big thing was, get someone who knows how to direct in that space and isn't afraid of it. Well, Gregory was a director, though ironically he never did direct in the Beaumont. So Bernie read this whole list of about 12 or 14 names of directors. And then there was this pause. And then he said, what do you think about Andre Bishop? And I mean, I'd never even occurred to me. I thought I really didn't like Lincoln Center. I thought I didn't approve of Lincoln Center. I thought it was too mainstream. I was nervous about thrust theaters, as you said. And but I said, well, he would be odd but interesting. And then I came up and had this kind of secret meeting at 8 AM when no one else was in the building with him and one or two others. And this all happened in a matter of three or four days. And they offered me the job. I had no interviews. I had met nobody on the board. And I took the job with unbelievable, almost unbearable sadness because I didn't want to leave Playwrights Horizons. Playwrights Horizons was my child. I mean, it had been Bob Moss's child. But we'd come a long, long way with that theater. And I loved it and believed in what it did. And I believe in what it does now, which is virtually the same as it did then, just better and better now. But I knew that if I didn't take this chance, I might never get a chance like this again. There are not that many theaters in New York to take over. None of the people who run them weren't going anywhere then. And they don't seem to be going anywhere now. And I also wanted to do more than just do new American plays. You know, I wanted to do Shakespeare. I wanted to do big musicals. I wanted to do revivals of some of the great musicals. I wanted to do the classics. So I said, sure, I'll do it. And it was, I hit the ground running. Gregory left in the middle of the season. I was working at Playwrights Horizons and at the Beaumont. There was nothing planned for Lincoln Center at all when I came there. And it was, if I had known how difficult it was going to be for a while, I don't know if I would have taken the job. But I didn't know. And it was the best thing I ever did. But it was really hard for the first few years. And I was, I mean, I'm prone to anxiety anyway. And I lived in a constant state of feeling anxious, and inadequate, and uncertain. That's the answer to the question. Going back to something you touched on earlier about it not just being a job where you select the season. So how deep is your involvement in the individual productions as they move forward? My involvement in the productions is intense in the beginning and intense at the end. And unless there's trouble extremely uninvolved in the middle. And by that, I mean I'm very involved in obviously the choice of director and designers and the look of the show. I'm very involved in the casting. If it's a new play, I tend to get very involved in the rewriting of the play to the degree that you rewrite it before you go into production. And like everyone, we do readings and workshops, all that stuff. But once we go into rehearsal, I stay away for a number of weeks, unless there's a reason for me not to. Usually because something's gone wrong. And then I come in at the end of the rehearsal in the room before moving on stage and see one or two run-throughs. And I try to avoid tech rehearsals as much as possible because it's just so unbelievably boring. And then I get very involved in previews. We have many, many previews at Lincoln Center. And I believe in them. Not everyone does, but I do. So you're suggesting that changes, really, significant changes get made in those previews? I do, especially musicals. I mean, I used to think, because of Playwrights Horizons, I used to think that you could turn something awful into something wonderful during previews. I don't think that anymore. I have come to recognize the truth, which is that a play and a production are, by the time you hit the first preview, the destiny of the play and the production of it is somewhat set. And you can make it ever better. You can, you know, you can, I mean, again in Act I, I don't know if, I'm sure many of you have read this book, I assume, if you haven't, you should read it. But, you know, there's all this stuff about once in a lifetime, the first play, Hoffman and Hart, wrote together. And they go to tryouts in the first act works and the second act doesn't. Then they rewrite it in the first act and the first half of the second act work and then the rest doesn't. And then Kaufman gives up. And Mosshard has a moment on the beach, just like mine. I think everyone has moments on the beach somehow. And goes back to Kaufman's house and said, I'm not giving up, god damn it. You know, you said you took me on as opposed to the hundred of other Playwrights you could have taken on. And we have an act and a half and we're going to fix it. And Kaufman reluctantly gives in and then they try it out again and then the first two acts are working but the third act isn't working. And Kaufman says something like, you know, we have to stop. The actors are exhausted. We're going to New York in four days. And I think we're about 70% there and we have to settle for 70%. And Hart, who's, you know, a young guy who doesn't know anything much, says, well, what do you think a success is in terms of percentage, especially for a comedy? And Kaufman says, well, for a comedy I'd say 90%. If you're lucky maybe you can get away with 85%. And so Hart once again goes back to the beach and decides how to rewrite the third act. And they've spent all this money with this new huge nightclub set that they put in at the last minute and he decides to get rid of the nightclub set and go back to a very simple two person scene to begin the third act. And Kaufman says, we can't do this. This is crazy. We only have four days. It's too dangerous. And Moss Hart says, no, I want to do this because you told me we were 70% there. And if we're 70% there, we can get to 100%. And that's what they did. My point being, and I didn't used to know this until really only about five or six years ago, that I can usually tell by the first preview of a show whether it's going to work or not. And I don't mean be a great critical success or box office. I just mean be artistically excellent. You can tell and you can sort of tell when it isn't. And you can work very hard to make something good better. And you can work very hard to make something stinky acceptable. But you can't, you don't have the luxury now of completely reversing your fortunes. At least I don't think so. It's hard in New York and there's also the insidious, insidious influence. And I say this with profound anger of the internet and these theater chat rooms filled with what seemed to me to be mostly, not entirely, but mostly people who like taking people down. And it's a terrible thing because all these critics, you know, they're at home alone with their computers and they read these chat rooms and no one can persuade me they're not influenced by that. And it didn't exist in the old days. I mean there was word of mouth that was good or bad. There was the telephone. But there is a pack of people who just, especially with musicals, who want to weigh in their opinion and are more than usually delighted if their opinion is negative in the very beginning. And what I don't like about it is that they write under a pseudonym. They don't write using their real names. And if they would write using their real names, their responses I'm sure would be more measured. You know, because in the old days, even when I was starting out, but in the fabled old days of Broadway when Moss Hart was writing, critics and theater journalists, as you know, there were many more newspapers, saw them, loved the theater and they saw themselves as caretakers of the theater. And by extension, they saw themselves as caretakers of the men and women who worked in the theater. That doesn't happen anymore. And it's a fact of our lives, but it's true. And it's an awful, awful thing. It's not true just of the theater. It's true, it seems to me most everything now. So in New York, it's hard. I mean, you have to be in decent shape when you start performances. And it used to be that you could be a little bedraggled and people forgave you because the tickets were cheap and it was a preview. Let's imagine we're getting close to where we turn it over to the audience for questions. So let's imagine that you've decided to take a year off to go to Tahiti and write your long dreamed of epic poem on the invention of linoleum. And we have by a lottery selected somebody to take your place for a year. What would be the most important advice you would want to give that person? I don't know. Yeah, actually, I mean, I mean, if I was going back. Yeah, if you were going back. So it's like a sabbatical. That's right. What are the things every new artistic director needs to know? Well, if I wasn't going back, if I was leaving the job, I would say to the board or whoever was in charge, find someone different from me because fresh blood is very important. And a new point of view about how a theater runs itself, what the theater does is good. Change is good in the hands of intelligent people. If it was just a year and I was coming back, I would say find somebody who's exactly like me because the theater, you can't disrupt a theater that way by someone who comes in only for a year and wants to do everything differently or even 50% of things differently. But I don't think I will ever take a sabbatical, but I think I will eventually, you know, I'm not gonna stay there until I'm 100 at all. And I would, I mean, it would be really good for the first time to have Lincoln Center Theater run by a director. The idea that I had all those years ago before I came to work there. That would be really interesting and that's never really happened. What's ever happened successfully? Well, yeah, I mean, Kazan, who was one of the original, they never actually made it up to Lincoln Center. And then the consortium of directors that were there in the, I guess, 70s when Richmond Crinkley was the producer, I mean, it lasted, I think they did two plays or something. But a really great director who would direct on those stages, especially in the Beaumont and also be the head of the theater, that would be interesting. And now let's take some questions from you. No, I'm very glad it was Mark Weston. I don't know if you recall the name of Abel Zunluck. I had an, well, I was with the playwrights from the word again when Mr. Moss. Probably before me. No, when you were there. I was there. He was a day of the painter, all those. Had an incident that happened about three months ago. In 1980, I had a play that was going to Broadway with Kevin O'Connor. And it was a successful play. But Kevin died and the play went down. I submitted it to playwrights Verizon about three, four months ago. I got the most interesting letter back saying, you're writing of the 80s. You're writing is in the 80s. We love the play, but it's not today. And I got to thinking, what do they mean? Now, my feeling is I'm wondering whether death of a salesman today, if it just started with Mr. Miller, would they have accepted it today? Or would half have to be a drug dealer? Who did have to be gay? I don't know. Is that the upgrading of a writer today to fit today's period? No, I don't think so. I mean, I don't know, because I haven't read the play, so it's hard for me to answer. I don't quite know what they meant. Whether the play, did they mean the play was that word people use, dated? The writing of the play. The writing was... Like Neil Simon, we always had a play every year. It's been a long time that Neil has been on Broadway. And I'm wondering if those plays came in today without his name just starting. Would they be on the stage today if they were written way back then? That's a really interesting question, because I don't think there's a really interesting answer. I don't know. I mean, I think the theater has always, like every profession, moved with the times. Artists, whether it's playwriting or music or whatever, are reflective of the society, or should be reflective of the world in which they live. I had this long conversation, well, I've had endless long conversations with the people about musicals and why don't the younger composers of today write melodies? And I don't know why. I used to have a theory that all the melodies, all the combinations of notes had already been arrived at, so that there were no more melodies. But I don't really know if that's true. But what I do know is the world that, all the greats that we all love, including going up to Rodgers and Hammerstein and even beyond to Steve Sondheim, their view of the world is quite different than the view of most young people now. I think most young people now, despite the fact that these people lived during several world wars, despite the fact that many of them were Jewish and refugees from abominable lives in Europe, or what could have been abominable lives in Europe, the world is a very precarious place and a very dissonant place. And I suspect that the story of composers is possibly the story of playwrights is that, I mean, we did this play of playwrights horizons called The Heidi Chronicles, which we did in 1989 by Wendy, and there's going to be a Broadway revival of it next year, which is the first time anyone, her executor, we haven't allowed any of her plays to be revived since her death. And the play was written in 1989 and it's a series of scenes that starred in, I think, 1968 or something with Eugene McCarthy and goes up to what was then the present when she wrote it in 1989. Well, now we're gonna be in 2015. And I was very afraid that the play would seem dated, especially the 1989 part, which was then today. And it's all about, as you know, women, the women's movement and a woman who, who she and her friends have every reason to believe that the ensuing years are gonna be ever better for them. And Heidi, at the end of it, has adopted this baby and Wendy was quite severely criticized at the time by many women because they thought she's copping out and she's saying the key to life is having a baby, which even is a single mom. And of course that wasn't what she was saying but that's what some people thought. And of course now she was prescient because gay men and women, including myself, have a child and women single alone or gay women or not have children. I mean, and the world of 1989 of her play seems just like another historical period. But what makes it interesting is we, the audience next year, will look at the end of her play and think, well, she was right, those women did get far and well, she wasn't so right and those women didn't get as far as they thought they were going to get. So the play has taken on, this is my hope anyway, this patina of great sadness and regret because the end of the play in 1989 was triumphant. And when people see it now, it's not so triumphant because we know what's happened in the past 25 years. That's a long answer again to saying about your play. Sometimes there needs to be more distance between when you wrote the play and even now, I mean, when we did these Odette's revivals, we did Awake and Sing on Broadway and Golden Boy. I mean, everyone said, oh my God, you're crazy. Odette's won't work because it was a period where his work was extremely unfashionable and thought to be anti-capitalist and communist, all that, none of which was very reasonable. And suddenly we did these plays and they caught on again. But we could barely get the rights to Awake and Sing because his son, Walt, who lives in LA, didn't want them done in New York in a major way. He was too afraid that people would say his father dated old. So it's not very helpful to you, but maybe send it to them in 10 more years and see. No, I'm semi-serious. Next question. All right. This is kind of a big question, but I guess I'm interested in your time working with playwrights and plays, that how you've seen the role of new plays change over the years and where you see it going. And you sort of, like you mentioned, the internet and media and changes into the media. I mean, it sort of seems to me that like new American plays used to be more of a big part of media and entertainment than they are now. And just how you've seen it change and where you think it's going. Two answers. I think the theater in general played a bigger part in the media that it does now because in the old old days there was no television. And then there was television and it imitated the theater for many years. And then it, but I think partly because the theater has been decentralized. I mean, New York is still perhaps the theater capital of the United States, but you all know there's a million theater companies all over this country. And they didn't start out by doing new plays, but they sure do now. And I think that we are living, I mean, I say this and people look at me like I'm insane. I think we're living in a golden age of American playwriting. There are new plays being done in vast quantities all over this country. It just, we don't know, when you're in the middle of something you don't know, I'm sure that the golden age of Athens, no one sat around saying this is the golden age of Athens. But we are in a golden age. And the demand for new plays, I know this may sound odd for those of you who were playwrights. The demand for new plays is enormous. It's much greater than it ever was. I mean, if you go back to the theater of what I was, Odette's or Moore's Heart, that theater mostly consisted of 20 or 22 playhouses all squeezed into mostly the West 40s of New York City. That was it. And those who wrote for the theater were pretty much the same sort of person. And the theater has, because the country has so diversified and changed. And you know, it's just that people in the theater are always like, everything is always negative and it's always like what isn't happening. And you know, this goes on in the nonprofit theater endlessly, this organization called TCG, which is a very useful, wonderful organization. But you know, you're always seminars about why aren't we doing this and why don't they do that and how can they do this when they should be doing that? And it just drives me wild. We should celebrate our theater in this country. And we do, but not enough, I think. No, you've raised your hand over and over again. So let you get in here. Okay, it's kind of a two-part question, but one is how has your mission evolved given all the changes in the culture and everything else, has it evolved to today? And also given all the plays, particularly I'm interested in musicals, but those musicals that you've read, you've produced over the years, is there a play that you are waiting for that hasn't yet arrived? No. You know, you open every play you read with a pounding heart. I mean, I love reading plays. I read at least six or seven a week and I've been doing that for years. You look, you do, I do look for the big, you know, the mythical creature, the big American play. I'm very sensitive to the fact that there are many great, small American plays. I mean, the fashion now is, as you all know, you know, 90 minutes, no intermission, that seems to be, I mean, when I went into the theater, it was just the end of the three act play. And the three act form is by far the most graceful form. It's like sonata form in music. It's a beginning and a middle and an end. Well, you can't possibly do three act plays. Now, I mean, occasionally, if it's a revival, but rarely. So, I'm sensitive to the fact that a lot of writers feel that they should or want to write small scale plays. And I appreciate it because those plays can be, we've done some short plays that are really astounding, what you can do in 90 minutes. But what you can do in two hours and 45 minutes can be astounding. But I think, you know, in the case of musicals, I think that's different because the young writers now, this is gonna sound foggy-ish and I don't mean it to be because I kind of welcome it, but they don't, they're not as interested in narrative. They're not, and I'm not saying this critically either, by the way, they're not so interested in cause and effect. And in musicals, you know, I grew up on Rodgers and Hammerstein and so I like good old musicals with plots and characters you care about and that's why we keep doing Rodgers and Hammerstein. We're about to do The King and I next year, which is gonna be my third and final cause we did Carousel and South Pacific R&H show, but that's not what the young writers are writing. What they're writing now is, has much less form, a lot of content and a lot of melody, if you can get through it, to it, but it's much more haphazard somehow because I think life to them is more haphazard. So I think for somebody like me in my job, I have to keep abreast of what's going on because it's the artists who tell us what's going on. I'm not the producer, I'm a producer, I'm not supposed to be telling the world what's going on cause I don't have all my ideas, virtually every idea I have comes from plays. So you look to the artist to be the barometer of the world and sometimes it's ugly. Is there somebody towards the back I'm just not seeing because I'm seeing mostly hands towards the front. Okay, if I'm not missing anybody, I almost called on you before. They're all asleep. Hello, my name's Leslie and I'm a lyricist librettist and my question is, what is it, twofold, what is it that really, really attracts you to in new musical as opposed to saying what are the things you really look for in that? Well, you know, we've done a lot of new musicals at Lincoln Center Theater and I did a lot when I was at Playwrights Horizons. I mean, we were almost, besides the public, the first non-profit theater to actually dare to take on new musicals and it's, that's a really hard question to answer. I think I've become slightly, I probably shouldn't be saying this, but I've become scared of new musicals. I've become scared, a little bit timid about producing them as brazenly as we used to because we've had some very hard knocks and sometimes we deserve them. I mean, sometimes we put on musicals that we're really not ready to face New York anyway. But I guess I still tend to look for those old things which are a story, character. I don't want to say melody because the definition of melody has so changed because the form of songs has changed. But where there's a complexity, I guess, of composing. But all the musicals that we've done that I've really loved, I guess if I look back on them and I really haven't up until this particular moment, some people would say, well, they're old fashioned. They would say the light in the piazza was old fashioned. They would say, perhaps that show we did that I love though it was not successful parade was old fashioned. They even might have said March the Falsettos, which I did at Playwrights, was old fashioned. But I'm looking for the same thing in content but I'm sensitive to the fact that the form has changed. Okay, we're down to our two last questions now. So if there is somebody towards the back room, make sure I see him and I see two hands. So you first and we'll see whether other people raise their hands for the final question and whether it's a competition or not. A classic or Shakespeare or something like that. How you decide that, you know, how to choose that. Does it sometimes come to you with an actor who wants to do it or a director who wants to do it? Not usually an actor, in fact, not an actor, but sometimes a director, but with revivals. I mean, there's certain writers that I really loved, Odette's being one of them and I do think and I hope that I'm not tooting our horn. I think that our revival of Awakening and Golden Boy has really spurred and Odette's revival in this country just because I'm aware of the plays now being done and they're big plays, they're quite hard to do just economically. You know, I love Shakespeare so I tend to want to do it and again to go back to something I said earlier, I have to be sensitive to the Beaumont stage. Odette's actually wouldn't work very well in the Beaumont but Shakespeare does. Anything that's presentational where the actor can take in the audience works in the Beaumont, which is why ironically it's such a great house for musicals or serious musicals, that's part of the reason South Pacific did as well as it did was because it was in a big theater that was nonetheless intimate and the back row is row P and we could do that reveal of the orchestra because of the thrust that you can't do in a Broadway theater. So with the revivals it tends to be like I'm passionate about J.B. Priestley and there's a play I'm longing to do called Time and the Conways, which I haven't been able to do yet. So I get these fixations and sometimes a director will come like Jack O'Brien came and said, let's do Henry IV, both parts as one evening and it's actually happened to be my favorite Shakespeare play, but it was his idea. Yes, sir. Two parts to the question. The musicals in the 60s and the 70s used orchestras of 20, 24 musicians, standard. Nowadays you have four or five musicians. Is it that the producers and the investors are making more money nowadays or is it the musicians are more expensive? What was the reason? Well, your question is basically a commercial theater question. It's not a question that I, fortunately, have to deal with very much because in the words of Bernie Gerstin, our job was not to make money, but to spend money. So when we did South Pacific, we had as many pieces as they had in 1949. We did the original orchestrations with the original size orchestra, but I'm coming from a different point of view than a commercial producer. We don't have investors to repay. We have a board to be responsible to, but commercial producers do and it's wildly expensive to have a big, big orchestra. And also, quite frankly, sound reinforcement is part of it because everything is mic'd, everyone is mic'd. Everything, you can put things on synchronizers that imitate five or six different instruments. The large orchestra, in some people's minds, is less necessary. It hasn't been our experience. I mean, we're doing the King and I and we're doing it with the same amount of instruments that they did in 1953. Otherwise, why do it? Part of the success of it and the glory of it was this incredible sound. Does that answer your question? Oh, is there another? Sorry. But you and the Roman theater accept unsolicited, unsolicited scripts for a musical course? We know. We can't. Our output is we're not a theater that does that much new work, you know? And we just can't keep up with it. If you can find it to come through like your best friend whom I know or some agent, we just can't keep up with it. There are other theaters, I assume, Playwrights Horizon's still being one, where they do, but the Beaumont is not a theater for new plays for the most part. It's just too big. Occasionally new musicals, but not even that. So get it to us another way. Andre, thank you. You're welcome.