 12.30. Is it that time? Good afternoon. Got lost there for a minute. Welcome to the last of the Brown Bag Lunch Interviews. We have a photographer here today from the Burlington Free Press. Did I get that right? Vermont Arts Council. Vermont Arts Council. Even better. From the Vermont Arts Council, who are funded for this festival. So he's simply asked permission that he be able to take photos. Does anybody have a problem? We have some black puppeteer masks if you really want to be in the news. Is that alright? Yeah. Okay. Thank you. Okay. We'll take that as a yes. Okay. We'd like to start with an art burst, and do you want to just tell them about this? Yeah. And I will say no more. We couldn't decide who should introduce whom. Because we're both in here. So we'll introduce each other, and I'll introduce him after he introduces us. So, Sherry Valeska and I did the same glass puppetry training last summer together. And this is a two week intensive. You guys want to say something about the process? Yeah. We all brought articles that interested us, and then we were given guidelines of how we could create the actual piece. And some of those guidelines were how many lines we could take out of the article. That there had to be a look back. Do you remember the other ones? Things like the two. The actual text. And then we made the show mostly after class, because we had instruction with Eric and Ines during the day. And then we worked on the piece and presented it once to each other, got some feedback, and then presented it one more time. And everything was created. So we've been holding on to this for a year. So you know what time does to cardboard and papers. Yes, there we go. The immigration crisis on the U.S. border isn't just about money. Far from it. But it does force a critical question. Does the influx of unaccompanied alien children contribute more money to the U.S. economy than it takes out? Boom or bust? The state is seeking $5 million in reimbursements for a decade of spending. The Senate is offering $2.7 billion and the House $1.5 million. Border operations cost $1.3 million a week. 1,000 National Guard troops reported price tag $12 million a month. $37 million undocumented children. Are you sure she's going to say something? It gives me great pleasure to introduce Eric Bass and Roberta Solomon and John Potter to talk today about their collaboration and I'll let them say more. Thank you for being here. We have one more show of El Patico Feo at Hilltop at 3 o'clock and then tonight Romeo and Juliet at NYT at 8. Last chance. So good afternoon. Thank you all for being here. As you heard, my name is John Potter. I'm the former arts editor of the Brattleborough Reformer. Now the executive director of the Latches and very pleased and honored to be asked by Sanglass to help facilitate these conversations. With me today is Eric Bass of Sanglass Theater and Roberta Solomon and we'll talk about their collaboration there. But to give you some context, El Salvador right now has been called the world's most homicidal country. They are averaging 30 murders a day and to put that into some context and how we would feel about that. That's the level of violence. 20 times more violent and deadly than the United States as a basis of population. As someone said, this country is bleeding and it urgently needs a tourniquet. And I don't know if Eric and Roberta will consider themselves the tourniquet, we'll find that out but we're here to talk about their collaboration and the context in which it occurred. Peace you guys have been working on. We've been working for a good number of years. I started my collaboration with Sanglass about 15 years ago and we've always been talking about doing a project together in Salvador and well, we're mixing actors and puppets and which ones can't and why they can and why they can't and we both like Nathan the Wise by lessing the 18th century German playwright very much and we finally decided that this was what we were going to go on and we started putting this project together which took the association between Sanglass Theatre and Teatro Lispoma with a lot of grants in between. We were able to do this project with actors over a period of a year and a half and first it started with a workshop in which we invited 15 actors to participate and it was a training program to be able to work with puppets the way we had designed the show to be and then we directed it with the help of Ines who did the puppets and contributed greatly to the training in... that's React and after this period of training which was about three weeks we chose seven actors out of the 15 and then started the rehearsal periods in... and we staged this we started staging this and then stopped for six months six months about, yes and then they came back to... we also continued to the rehearsals and then we just presented the show last month in El Salvador and the effect has been very, very positive and it's been very well received and it's a play that talks basically at tolerance but it talks about a lot more things that have to do with El Salvador and that really touched the audience and really felt like we were talking about El Salvador with the intolerance and the murder rate and whatnot but other than that it's still a beautiful country and our Blue Lake has just turned turquoise last week so that's the nice news too I like to give nice news about countries today now we're the murderers I should go ahead, Scott Ainslie a local wonderful blues musician also a very good theatre composer came down with us to Salvador to create the score for this piece it's a wonderful score and I might say just a word about the relationship between the actors and the puppets that the story takes place during the... and we made the decision to let the puppets be costumed and so what did we do with the actors? so we made the decision to costume the actors as if they came from different classes of contemporary Salvadoran society and by doing that we created a fiction that we don't talk about in the play but it's as if seven people from different classes of Salvadoran society made a politician, a gang member to do something that they don't do come together and do a play about racial and religious intolerance and the play begins, you'll see it when we show a little video it begins with them presenting themselves and ends with them presenting themselves and one of the... God, one of the... was someone in the audience who said how can you have a maid on stage and how can you let her manipulate the puppet of the sister of a sultan you know, I mean the class stuff was... would you agree with that? absolutely, yeah absolutely except it was a third crusade thank you maybe Eric, you could delve a little deeper into the play, Nathan, the wine tolerance themes come to light Lessing was perhaps the great spokesman for the German Enlightenment in the late 1700s and a great friend of Moses... there you go philosophers, writers you've derailed me is that... Muslims, Christians, Jews are all represented in the play as they were of course in this place and time and they were in this place and time essentially enemies within the whys the actual plot of the play is one in which everyone surprises himself by rescuing his enemy and then can't deal with the emotions of having done that it's utterly brilliant and being rescued by their enemy also yes, yes we do a two-person number here yeah, yeah, we're bringing out that so the Templar for instance is about to be executed by the sultan the sultan looks at his face and sees in it the face of his own lost brother and spares his life the Templar then runs out into the world almost deranged from having been spared from being beheaded sees a fire, rushes into this house on fire and rescues a young Jewish woman a Jew his sworn enemy so in the Templar alone is this battle of being both rescuer and rescued by his enemies and that's basically that's the battlefield of this piece and the Jewish girl is Nathan the Wise's daughter and Nathan is a merchant and Saladin needs money for his wars and Nathan has just loaded with goods and has a lot of money and doesn't know where to place it so he becomes Nathan's moneylender so everybody owes something to somebody and everybody is is owing something Eric, when we talked it struck me that the transformative moments for these people occurred through their actions rather than them receiving it was through action and I've just found that an interesting interesting approach and we also talked about how is tolerance the right word for what happens maybe you could ruminate on that a little bit you don't know this we had a enlightening yes, no we had a in Salvador after one of the performances in which we invited the interreligious conference of Salvador where there's an Imam a couple of evangelists a Catholic priest, a rabbi and a Buddhist and strangely enough it's the Buddhist that runs it not strange at all anyway it's this very ecumenical group and they came to a performance and after the show and it was interesting that one of the themes that came out precisely you were just talking about is tolerance because the rabbi brought up that he was very offended by this word tolerance because he said it's not really a play about tolerance because tolerance means that you're better than the other one whose presence you're tolerating so we thought that was interesting and really shed light on what we were doing yeah and I think you know it's I think here it's kind of a 60s term and I think that it's no longer well received as it doesn't say what we mean yeah do you have a word for what you mean? no engagement solidarity could you shed some light on what's causing the conditions in El Salvador and then maybe moving into what it's like to create well the main thing is the historical unjust distribution of wealth in Salvador but let's say that if the United States legalized drugs but then of course and if the arms sales stopped that would help a lot too so I mean what this is is it's since the Cold War era Central America has been in the eye of the hurricane as a center of war commerce which later became drugs and Salvador is more dangerous now that it was during the war during the Civil War and what happened is that the gangs which you all know about and over 600,000 people depending on the extortions of the gangs so when people say get rid of the gangs I mean you know there are articles in the papers saying we did in Honduras, why don't we do that which is basically putting 100 gang members in an airplane and then crashing that airplane into a prison where there are another couple of 100 gang members I mean this is one of the solutions but of course when you see the when you see the jails and the way these jails that are designed for 200 people and have 900 people in them or 2,000 people in them you just wonder about how do you get out of this I mean I don't have an answer but mainly the problem is there is also a very big other countries it does not exist in Nicaragua or in Costa Rica or in Panama nor in Guatemala for very different reasons but this exists in Salvador and Honduras which is class hatred there is an exacerbated situation of class hatred in Salvador which is not logical actually that it doesn't exist in other countries well Costa Rica solved the problem years ago in which they simply killed all the local population Guatemala is a whole racist problem it's not a class problem it's a race problem with its indigenous population but Salvador has this extraordinary thing of this really very very strong class hatred which can't be taken out by the root well clearly you put that in your production an examination of class I don't think you can do this otherwise when I started doing theater in Salvador one of the directors in the late 60s called me over when I came in with my cast to the national theater and he said you're really going to do theater with this bunch of Indians because before that before the late 60s he's sort of a little taller a little blonderer and a little wider what was it a hard decision to talk about costuming the actors in various classes at what point did that enter the conversation yes it was a very hard decision because I was against it at the beginning thank you for saying that part of that is that theater as a vehicle for social change in the United States is in a very different position from theater as a vehicle for social change in Salvador that what constitutes which aspects of theater constitute social change in these two countries is different and in the theme has a lot to do with it as well as casting and so forth and so on but if we're trying to raise money for this production and a good part of the money that enabled us to do that came very thankfully from national performance network theater communications group private family foundation so a good part of it was raised here not all of it on some of the work and that meant writing grant applications and that meant being very clear in the grant applications why you know why this project we weren't just a bunch of American missionaries going out to do Oklahoma it was this play with this people in this configuration in that place and articulating that I think also helped us understand what the you know this is the beautiful thing about writing grants is that sometimes it's as you're writing the grants that you discover what you really want the production to be it's not it's there's this is a very nice dynamic sometimes and it was very clear to me that this needed to be a play about Salvador and and it certainly wasn't written about so you know so what are the choices you know are we gonna costume the puppets and give everybody a kind of a contemporary Salvador in way of speaking you know or um in the puppets which is a natural place to go in puppet theater and so the way to address this really really happened in how we used that relationship to help us create that part of the world which was Salvador and then Salvador's relationship to doing this classic piece so that that discussion approach then I think then what you first envisioned and and our discussions kind of led us to to work that out and then once we had that who were these people and certainly Roberto brought to this conversation a really different perspective than some of the stereotypes that I had about how these costumes are going to be read in the context of the Salvadoran audience and there's another element I think that is important to point out is that in the translation Eric did a translation in verse in a sort of an 18th century English also using inverted terms that we don't use anymore and I used a translation, I adapted one but you adapted it, yes and working on this translation which I did into Spanish inverse to use as many terms possible as were terms that would ring a bell in a Salvadoran ear today which is like there's been a truce between the government and the gangs so what Saladin has with the Templars is a truce, it's not a stopping of war like in the last week so all these terms that all of a sudden brought the play back to life like brought the play to today in Salvador like at one point at one point the Sultan's emissary asks Nathan where is the money and we said where are the bags and this in Salvador is immediately recognized and the next president is in how do you say when you're in jail in your own home house arrest from Taiwan and it's called the bag issue because it's money bags right so all this is very important to me anyway and to us generally is to have the play resonate in the ear of the spectator who's watching it today which is something that I'm always blessed with because I'm always working in translations so translation allows that do you feel that maybe it's too early to tell do you feel that it's making a difference or how will the play make a difference no I really don't I think we can make people more sensitive but I don't really think that I'm going to be 70 this year so I stop thinking that we can change the world with theatre but we can contribute to it there have been some nice repercussions we got one of the nicest reviews that came out Ines and I were still down there on the first weekend that the show opened for its initial three some of those first reviews one of the ones that Roberto showed us came not from a theatre critic but from a political columnist a leftist political columnist place of such violence this production is a breath of fresh air did I get that right? yes he's the rightist columnist even better okay so comments like as a manipulator of a royal figure I mean what can you do you can create some kind of you can throw a pebble in the stream you can do little shock waves hope that there's shock waves there you are we have a ten minute is this a good time somebody turning that on this will give you it's just excerpts just give you an idea of the staging and how this feels it's a cast of seven it starts in dark times live theatre alright sorry we need to restart the computer so let's take another question okay Michelle what was your initial and finally agreed to do what was your initial that well it's not a coincidence that Eric has talked a lot about the maid because that was the one that was clear the others weren't clear because I really don't know what a gang member looks like today I mean I live that every day of when I'm going home in my car and wondering gee I wonder if that's a gang member on the corner there and I wonder if that person coming towards my car is going to pull out a gun yeah just one second but the you know to me it was difficult to have some clear iconography as to how to dress them it's one of the most difficult shows I've had to dress because of that we were on the beach one day we had a day off and we went to this beautiful beach and one of Roberto's friends on the beach was standing and talking group of people Nara was there for anyone who hasn't met Nara Salomon Roberto's wife and she also plays Nathan in the show on the screen momentarily and we're standing there and five young men pass us on the beach and since he says young men passing on the beach they were five young men passing on the beach and now you immediately think am I about to get robbed is this a gang so are we ready I don't know if I answered your question Michelle what's that I don't know if I answered your question I think you did, yeah defining an aesthetic approach that was flexible and broad enough so that you would not be too specific in your delineation of meaning so that they would be echoes and reverberations yeah but it's very difficult to try to keep away from from the kind of production also you just the Chinese slippers with the black leotards yeah because this is what I thought and then of course we were limited to taking seven actors because we want to travel with the play and anything over seven seven is already a very big group to move around but anything over seven is just completely out of the question the fact that the one who plays the maid plays the princess so how do you do change costumes do you do not how do you deal with that and I think well you'll see here the puppeteers are playing puppets who have in terms of character but they don't become a that we're doing here is and I did this in the adaptation this was the way the adaptation was formulated and one of the dramatic things that Roberto and I then had to figure out did it work and if so how does it work that in the relationship between actors and puppets we essentially have two different to each other they're not in the same world and so what defines this and so you know and why are some puppets and others not and so essentially what we did was we took the five characters who are in some way what we'd consider the family the people who represent the characters in this play who are interconnected there are other characters in this play who further the plot but who are not interconnected and so for me dramaturgically they actually don't need to be characters they are they are forces that act on this central grouping of characters and I think you'll see that really clearly in some of the scenes Jen can we go and one of the things that I find amusing in this experience is the fact that you have to sort of the actor has to become neutral in order to be able to go through the puppet but a neutral that is not an effacement of what you are and of course this is incredibly difficult in Central America and Mexico where the tendency to melodrama is extremely strong and we are all very melodramatic and so we had a very hard time doing that here we go this should work did you get that heavy big playbook where you remember the old movies the movie the war and you know how many times you are going to be killed and almost your father knows who you are and you know who you are and you know who you are now I have seen who you are then you will remember what you do in a world again Music's got answers, yeah. So where is this headed next? Well, we're going on tour to Honduras in October, and we're trying to get a tour organized in the states. Latino communities. Right now we're working on the New York and the Washington area. But the idea is not to bring only this play, along with four other Salvadoran playwrights' productions. But it involves 20 people, so it's a dream. A lot of cats to her. Particularly Salvadoran elements, particularly the costumes, might be lost on audiences that don't know about this. And how will you give that context to people? Questions from people. Anybody have any questions? Yes, ma'am. Since you put so much work into the English translation, is there a chance to see it in English as well? No. This production just belongs to Teatro de Lisbonna. Yeah, but you know the reason why I was asking is because Lessing is not really a known component in the US. Completely and well. And I honest left his work. That's why I thought it would be really nice to get a chance. F. Murray Averhands doing it at CSE in the North this season. Really? Yeah. I have to say that one of our challenges, it's I think the play as written for a contemporary with an embarrassing melodramatic ending. And that all of a sudden everybody's related. Oh, God, that's so nice. And so I think the puppets helped figure out how to make it playful without losing the truth of it. Doing a play with a message and telling everybody it's a message, I mean, this is really kind of embarrassing. And recognition scenes just bring forth laughter. Now in the 19th century people would actually faint in the audience because it was such a standard thing to the lost child. That's something being one of the inside, as you can see from the pictures, it's amazing. What I really felt was very interesting for us is that the philosophy of the play was for us to use as the philosophy of the team playing it. Because with the technique of, I would say, San Blas Theater or what they offered us, we really had to put away all our differences and all our different way of being, of acting or anything to be able to create together life for the puppet. Because as in the play we speak about there's three vulnerabilities, but when we are three to give life to one being, like the character of the puppet, we have really to breathe together to be one. And that was really interesting. We had to work a lot on ourselves and I guess everybody working this kind of technique has to, even more than when you build a play, what you generally have to try to understand each other. But there it was so much stronger to give life to one of the character between three so different persons when you have to be part of the body. And so I thought really it was interesting to have this philosophy of the play in the team who is giving life to the play. In the staging, just to expand on that, I think that the staging by necessity creates a non hierarchical society. So Nada is Nathan, she gets to do the F. Murray Abraham moment and then the next moment she's on the feet of a puppet and a character dressed as a high level politician comes out and commands the stage with his character one moment and the next moment he's on the feet of a puppet and it's fluidly changing from one to another and everyone, metaphorically as well as physically, everybody's willing to take the feet of somebody else. I think that from the puppet perspective that is the ultimate non hierarchical society. How can I help you walk? So that's what happens. Could you guys talk about your long relationship together? How much work you've done? How to where we started today? Well, I first saw Sandglass when they performed in Geneva, Switzerland and I was very taken by it. I don't know if it was invitation to heaven or sand. I can never remember that. To me the place mixed. Very impressed by the work and then I think Eric was at the time looking for somebody to direct him in sort of a very crazy project that he had with improvisations, with puppets. And so we tried that and we performed that a couple of times. And that one failed miserably but it led to better things. Right, and it was a horrible show. Because you can't really improvise. You have to make them as you go along, right? Of course you can, but not the way we had set out to do. So this led to something else which was a fantastic project which was One Way Street, a navigation of Walter Benjamin which to me is one of the most beautiful shows I've ever done. And it was not only a fantastic life-changing experience for me discovering Walter Benjamin and Hannah Arendt and Gershom Sholam and their writings and what this means in the world today. And that was a beautiful show which had a great career in a memorable place in the show. I can thank the Salvadoran Civil War for having met Roberto and Nara because you were basically in exile for 12 years in Geneva. 25 years. So thank you Ronald Reagan. That's not something we've heard a lot during this festival. I was being ironic. Any other? He was totally awry. He's like, don't put that out on record. Can you talk about some of the evidences of the violence that you saw while you were down there creating and how that made you feel? Yeah, I mean I guess the several of them that impacted we were actually coming back from dinner one night and Roberto got a call from one of his good friends to ask if we were all right and we didn't know why he was asking that and someone had thrown a grenade into a hotel in the neighborhood. We were down there when the gangs gave an ultimatum that there was going to be a curfew and we were in the middle of rehearsal and all of a sudden they stopped and they're all looking and Roberto looks up and says, what's going on? It's after time we need to get home before the gang curfew and Roberto says, oh, right, right, pack up quick. We're gone, we've got to get home. And then there was just... We lost one of the finest members of the first workshop who was going to be in the play because half the time he couldn't make it to the workshop because he lives in a gang infested area where he has to ask permission to leave the neighborhood and they said no that day and the next day they said no and just call and say, I can't come in. There are things that are bigger than the theater even if the show must go on, sometimes it can't. And what was that like creating in that context? Louder, louder. What? Enes needs to be louder. Enes needs to be louder. He was inspiring because he put everybody into a different focus, he really focused in a different way because your subconscious constantly was dealing with something that you tried to push in the background but kept on working but you couldn't fully get rid of it. For me it was very exciting. I always find it a terrible thought to think that great art has always been produced under times of great censorship but great art does get born around very difficult situations. I guess I would just say we were very aware that every day we would wake up and look at the news to see how many people had been killed that day and who they were. A doctor, not a gang member and so we would have to say why in some place there was some connection to the gangs. You know, in one day it was there's always this question of why is it those people? What's the connection? Is it random? Is this accident totally random and anybody could go out at any time? And that question I think was always with us so that we could just try and understand where we stood. Do you agree with that? And the great tragedy of Salvador is that an exodus of people during the war and after the war and now it's a country that has one editorialist who I despise said but I think it was very clear so I'll quote him. He said Salvador even death has class consciousness because basically it's poor young men who are getting killed. I have a question here. I'm hearing that in some ways it is the randomness that Erich was talking about. The perception is that it's random because you're not on the inside you can't possibly know why somebody was targeted and so it feels random. I think under those circumstances sometimes petty differences disappear and people work together as a team because they're in the same boat and it feels like that. Anybody because of the randomness could not be able to make the next rehearsal. You just don't know. But just a question. Is it random if a couple of gang members show up at your doorstep and say we have singled out your house as a gang house and you have to leave by tonight or we'll kill you? No, that's not right. But their choice can be random. Can be random. Exactly. From your point of view if you don't know that there's a definitive reason behind your being chosen it feels random. Right, exactly. But the people in the company that Ernest is talking about I would think if you were working together on something that whatever petty differences might have bothered you if you had been someplace else where that would just fall away. I mean you can't afford that. I think sadly the pay differences are still very present in the political world of Salvador and Roberto has said to me that if the right and the left would stop arguing would stop fighting each other somebody might actually come up with a plan for the country. But not within the theater truth. That's what I meant. Not in the country. That can happen obviously. One more question. I think we have time for it. Yes, over here. You've talked about class as being the big dividing or splitting society up. What about gender? It's a difficult question to answer because the feminist society and yet this is a society in which there are almost no fathers. The fathers are very absent. It's a society that is primarily led by women. They are the breadwinners. I don't know what the percentage of mothers who are the head of households without fathers is, but it's enormous. This is something inherited from the colonies and the conquest. So in very many on site you would think it's almost a matriarchal society but it isn't. Gender equality, of course there is not but there is much politically much more than in the states. All the countries in Latin America that have had women presidents they don't know what the big Hillary thing is about anyway. There are so many countries that have already had women presidents. A Salvador is not a case in point because we have not. But in the work field are women paid less than men? Yes. I think the inequalities are still there. In the past three or four years there are several laws that have been passed to protect. In the past 20 years there has been a lot of laws protecting women and children. For instance, there is a law that if a woman can prove her husband the father of her children's alcoholism she can actually cash in his paycheck. And then there is the compulsory protection for children in which a father who does not and whose paternity is proved the mother can have his salary taken from his paycheck before he gets his paycheck. And these sort of things there is a Nanta feminisidio that a murder of women what do you call that in English? Massage your name maybe? Massage your name perhaps? I don't know the term. In Spanish it's the killing of women. The murder of women. Sounds like mothers to me. There is a law against difficult application but institutionally there are things moving but there is no equality. There is still a lot of derecho de piano. Yeah, I don't know how you say it. Right. I know how you say it in French. I don't know how you say it in English. Women thinking they can do very many women than ever, right on that imposed sexual relation just because they are male and she is female. We are out of time and I want to thank Eric and Roberto and all of you. Thank you for being here.