Episode 713 - George C. Wolfe / Daniel Nazer
Marc:Lock the gates!
Marc:All right, let's do this.
Marc:How are you?
Marc:What the fuckers?
Marc:What the fuck buddies?
Marc:What the fucking ears?
Marc:What the fuckadelics?
Marc:It's me, Mark Maron.
Marc:I host this show.
Marc:This is WTF, the podcast.
Marc:Welcome.
Marc:If you're new, as I see some of you are at times, I'm looking around.
Marc:Welcome.
Marc:There's a lot of there's I think.
Marc:Are we officially a rabbit hole yet?
Marc:When does WTF become a rabbit hole?
Marc:Let's say that I am.
Marc:If you're just getting in, you want to go over to Howl, howl.fm, and go down the rabbit hole of the incomplete archive.
Marc:So pretty exciting show today, in my mind.
Marc:We've got George C. Wolfe on the show today, who is an amazing and important
Marc:theater producer and director uh i went to see his new show shuffle along or the making of the musical sensation of 1921 and all that followed which is based on it's based on an old play shuffle along and it's sort of that play is sort of within the
Marc:play with some of the songs but it's it's put into a different context it's deconstructed to explore the impact of that play and the careers of the people that were involved in that play and it was it was pretty fucking phenomenal for me because there was a lot of history there than I would not have ever known and there was also a lot of explaining and historical context for trends and in dance and theater and
Marc:and in black entertainment at the time and the impact of that and how that fragmented.
Marc:It was a fascinating thing.
Marc:I'll talk about that in a bit.
Marc:But he also directed and produced The Two Angels in America in New York.
Marc:He did Jelly's Last Jam was his first big success in New York.
Marc:He did Caroline or Change, which was another Tony Kushner play along with The Two Angels in America.
Marc:Anyways, very important
Marc:Theater presence and power.
Marc:I was thrilled to talk to him.
Marc:I'm also going to do a little talk with Daniel Naser about where the patent troll issue is.
Marc:Some of you who are just getting on board missed a panic and fury and chaos of when podcasters were being attacked by patent trolls who wanted to shake us down for a licensing fee.
Marc:of nebulous amounts that no one, I don't believe anyone buckled, but they were definitely, you know, Corolla ended up in court on this thing.
Marc:And I guess a lot of us thought it was over, but it is not quite over.
Marc:And we're always vulnerable to this kind of horrendous bullshit from predatory lawyers and so-called inventors.
Marc:I talked to Daniel Lazor a bit about that to find out what the odds are and where that's at and how safe we are.
Marc:But it's good to catch up on that malfeasance.
Marc:The AT&T issue, some of you are keeping abreast.
Marc:If anyone out there knows anyone or knows even what this job is, I'd like someone to come to my office with some sort of machine that assesses the amount of RF or bad waves or whatever waves that
Marc:are coming into my office because I'm no longer concerned just about the stereo and the horrendous machine-like techno buzzing that's coming through it.
Marc:I'm concerned about my health and about the impact of those waves from working basically within a cell tower.
Marc:And if anyone knows anybody or knows what that is or what I'm looking for and would like to help me, I'd like that help.
Marc:I would like to know exactly how much of the juice is just raining down upon me from the machinery on the roof.
Marc:So this has now gotten bigger than the stereo, and now I'm worried about my brain.
Marc:I'm worried about the impact that the waves are having on my brain.
Marc:Is it frying my brain?
Marc:Is it enlightening me?
Marc:Is it causing me badness?
Marc:I'd like to spend time in my office, but AT&T is not...
Marc:enabling that they've said they'll send a technician over again this would be the third or fourth time to figure something out but you know how that goes with these corporations oh we got to placate this guy again send someone over we need the tower off of the building i don't believe it's safe there's got to be other options so please if a wave assessor could make himself
Marc:present can make himself known that would be appreciated if there are any wave assessors out there with a wave assessing machine i would uh i would i would appreciate that so this is important we're going to revisit
Marc:The patent troll situation because it is still happening.
Marc:And everybody who podcasts, everybody who appreciates podcasting and everybody who appreciates, I guess, the entrepreneurial spirit of progress in general should know about these fucking patent trolls.
Marc:Because like, look, the podcast patent stuff has gone quiet a bit, but that doesn't mean, obviously, that it went away completely.
Marc:The organization that took up the fight on the legal front for us is the Electronic Frontier Foundation, the EFF.
Marc:And I asked Daniel Naser, a staff attorney for the EFF, to stop by and tell me what's going on, including how the case is going against the podcast patent troll.
Marc:And that's what you're going to hear right now.
Music
Marc:Daniel Naser, right?
Marc:Daniel Naser, that's right.
Marc:That's the way you pronounce the last name?
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:We have been in contact for a few years?
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:Since the patent troll situation?
Marc:Yep.
Marc:The EFF, let's elevate people's awareness about
Marc:of what the EFF is before we get up to speed on what doesn't seem like closure to me.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:So we're a nonprofit.
Guest:We've been around for 25 years now.
Guest:We got 30,000 members, and we have an office in San Francisco with a bunch of lawyers, a bunch of technologists, and a bunch of activists.
Marc:Yeah.
Guest:And we fight for civil liberties and innovation online.
Guest:And part of that mission, particularly my mission, is to fight the patent trolls.
Marc:Well, you guys came to the rescue of podcasters because it was a good thing for you guys to do.
Guest:Yeah.
Marc:It was a practical, winnable situation in a way.
Marc:That's exactly right.
Marc:And it had a public face.
Marc:It wasn't complicated.
Marc:It was like, these guys are trying to shake down these little guys.
Marc:Yeah, that's exactly right.
Marc:And we love podcasting.
Guest:It's a thing.
Guest:Often we're guests on podcasts about technology.
Guest:A lot of fans of your show in the office.
Guest:Oh, good.
Guest:Nice to know.
Yeah.
Guest:And it was very relatable.
Guest:It was some guys who'd been sending cassettes in the mail back in the day and that had a very vague idea about content on the Internet.
Marc:Well, let's go through that.
Marc:Because I don't always understand.
Marc:Like, a lot of the listeners, they helped out.
Marc:They got some money to you guys, and you guys put this case together to...
Marc:destroyed the patent that was being used by the patent troll to claim that the technology for podcasting, pre-existed podcasting, and this guy had designed it.
Marc:It was never made into a machine.
Marc:It was never executed.
Marc:But it was a cassette delivery device on a timely basis.
Guest:Yeah, and these guys did try and make kind of a precursor to the iPod, but they never got any traction with it.
Guest:But what the patent was was an idea for sort of ordered content online, and it was very vague.
Guest:It was basically a table of contents on the Internet with the links going to media files.
Guest:And the problem was, from our perspective, is that even in 1996, which was a long time ago in Internet land,
Guest:Even then, that was not new.
Guest:Even then, people had been doing that, and that's what we told the Patent Office.
Marc:But I know that the people that have been listening to this show for a while know that we were all, well, five of us or six of us were pretty terrified enough at this being a real thing.
Marc:A lot of other podcasters are like, I don't know.
Marc:It doesn't seem real to me.
Marc:But this was a very real thing that that they could have shaken us down for a lot of money.
Marc:Then they could have licensed podcasters.
Marc:They could have asked every podcaster for a percentage of money relative to their patent.
Marc:They could have asked for a fee weekly, monthly, daily, yearly, whatever from podcasters and be legitimized in doing that because of the support from the patent office.
Marc:Correct.
Guest:Yeah, that's right.
Guest:And you were right to be concerned.
Guest:I mean, they did sue Adam Carolla and they dragged him down to the Eastern District of Texas and he had to fight the lawsuit down there.
Guest:And that's no picnic.
Marc:And then they wrote like they they let it.
Marc:I think they didn't anticipate how loud we would all be.
Marc:And the the front operation, personal audio or the office, the empty office with a phone in it in East Texas.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:You know, it didn't even have a phone.
Guest:At one point, it came out in discovery that it was literally a mailbox forwarding address that they had down there that they were claiming was their office in Texas.
Guest:No shit.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Really?
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:That's fucking disturbing to me.
Marc:So what happened was is we got you some money.
Marc:You decided to take it on as part of, you know, you're a non-for-profit, so you weren't representing us.
Marc:That's right.
Marc:That was always made very clear to me when I was, you know, calling in a panic.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:julie sort of like i would call her up and be like what do we fucking do she's like well i need you to know that i'm not your lawyer i cannot represent you can we cover lrs yeah yeah and but but ultimately you realize that it was a it was a good case yeah and what you did was you got some money through donations and you did you have a bunch of lawyers that work pro bono and some sort of uh harvard think tank or something yeah
Guest:So we did a lot of the work ourselves.
Guest:It's me and a colleague, another colleague called Vera Ranieri, did a ton of work on this petition ourselves.
Guest:And we also had a law firm help us pro bono.
Marc:So this guy's patent was from 1996.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:And he just decides, like, I can make some money on this.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:So he sort of backloads it into podcasting.
Guest:Yeah.
Marc:And the language is vague enough and broad enough and dense enough for it to seem like it covers everything.
Marc:So it's a big net, these patents.
Marc:Yeah.
Guest:In our view, this is a patent where there is a big problem with these really broad patents that the people that are getting them didn't genuinely contribute to the technology.
Guest:The technology that grew and podcasting came out of that, that would have happened exactly the same way if these guys had never done anything.
Marc:And that's what you have to prove with the review process.
Guest:Yeah, with the review process, we had to find stuff from way back in the early 90s, mid 90s and show it to the patent office.
Guest:So we had like an MIT thesis that we like found in the MIT library.
Marc:And this is what you call prior art.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:So in order to invalidate a patent, you have to find prior art that will prove even one of the parts of the patent.
Marc:That's right.
Marc:And then the whole thing comes unraveled.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Yeah, and we challenged the specific claims of the patent that they were asserting against you guys, which went to the server rather than the device.
Guest:And so we went and we found these things.
Guest:One of them was called the Geek of the Week.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And it was a dude who's actually sort of a longtime supporter of EFF who was interviewing technologists on the Internet and putting it up there in 94.
Guest:Yeah.
Marc:Right.
Marc:Nice.
Marc:Did you guys like get a high five of each other when you found that in the office?
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Looking for prior art is kind of fun.
Marc:It's a treasure hunt.
Marc:Now patent trolls is a pervasive problem within the tech world.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:Happens all the time.
Marc:That if one of these guys and a lot of them are not individual inventors, they're there.
Marc:They're companies that literally buy up patents and then just go through them to see what how they can do this.
Marc:So you write a continuation, which is you rewrite the patent to a certain degree and then you refile it and then you go out and sue.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:Technology that it kind of applies to.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:That's a business.
Marc:Yeah, yeah, absolutely, absolutely.
Marc:And now this guy, Dave Logan, from Personal Audio, from my understanding, was not in that business.
Marc:This was a guy that actually owned that package of things.
Guest:Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Marc:He was one of the named inventors from back in the day.
Marc:But he was partnered with one of these.
Guest:Yeah, you know, pretty much anyone suing in Eastern District of Texas, you really have to kind of raise one eyebrow at him about how genuine the deal is, because that's where the most abusive litigation happens.
Guest:right and i think this american life covered it so that what is it with this eastern district of texas that how does the judiciary arm of this state become this sympathetic without you know coming under investigation themselves it's it's been as it's a strange story it's it's the it's a federal court it's it's located in marshall texas it's pretty sleepy town and over the years they've had some rules that are pretty plaintiff friendly yeah they support the the people bringing the suits and
Guest:It's become more and more people go there and becomes a bigger thing.
Guest:And it starts to actually support the local economy.
Guest:There's like printers, hotels.
Guest:And it's just this huge thing down there.
Marc:So patent trolls from around the world come there and they can do their paperwork there.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:When they show up for their court case, if there's a problem and they need to run off some stuff, there's a new copy place down the street.
Marc:And there's a hotel that's got all the technology you need to make sure your documents are in order.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Yeah, yeah.
Guest:It's a pretty big deal down there.
Guest:And it is unfortunate because I don't think it's really fair.
Guest:It doesn't make any sense for Adam Carolla to be dragged out there, to be sued by a guy who actually lives in the Northeast and has just incorporated a shell company.
Marc:Yeah, that's right.
Marc:A shell company.
Marc:The thing is, thank God Adam went down there.
Marc:But that's the other thing that people really need to know is that these patent trolls bankrupt businesses.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:And the problem, the reason why they get traction is that for me or Adam or any of us to defend ourselves in a case like this, we would not have the money.
Marc:And they would bleed us.
Marc:And then we would lose by default.
Marc:So you guys stepping in was very helpful to the medium and helpful to us personally.
Marc:But I mean, it is a predatory business and Adam couldn't even follow through.
Marc:I mean, Adam put a big bank together and they dismissed it.
Guest:Yeah.
Marc:Right.
Guest:Isn't that right?
Guest:that would happen yeah so adam you know adam really stood up he did he did a really good thing he fought hard down there and he crowdfunded some money himself right puts paid a bunch of money out of his own pocket as i understand it um and eventually they gave up they realized that he was going to keep fighting and i i think i think he would have played pretty well in front of a jury down there i think he was going to be a much more sympathetic defendant than right tv companies they've been suing right
Marc:and uh eventually they gave up and you know between us and adam and just generally the community like really stood up to them and i think right that's what did it but what about the other ones like yeah have you been in touch with uh i know they saw they did some podcasts with deeper pockets yeah and there was some uh the uh some other shows uh cbs shows that they went after what happened in those cases yeah well they actually went to trial in texas and they won the personal audio
Guest:What?
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And before we did.
Guest:So these things, they go on parallel tracks and Adam got out and then they went to trial against CBS and they won in front of a Texas in front of a jury there in Marshall.
Guest:And and that was that was going to go up on appeal.
Guest:And while that was waiting, we want our case at the patent office.
Guest:And so we knocked out the patent.
Guest:And now that everything in Texas is now stayed.
Guest:It's all just on hold.
Guest:And while our appeal happens, because we've essentially killed the patent, we've essentially- Oh, so they won.
Marc:But that's what they're sort of banking on.
Marc:If no one had filed that, the, what do you call it?
Marc:The interparties review, yeah.
Marc:The review, then they would have just gone and made their money.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:And then they would have had a precedent set.
Marc:And once that precedent was set, they could go after any of us.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:And it would be very hard for any of us to fight it.
Marc:Yeah, that would- In any court.
Guest:Yeah, it does get tougher.
Guest:You do get your own day in court, even if they've won against someone else, but it's so expensive.
Guest:I mean, you know a bit about what Adam Carolla went through, but taking one of these cases to trial is a million-dollar enterprise.
Marc:Okay, so now two questions.
Marc:One is, how is the patent office so vulnerable?
Guest:Yeah, you know, I think, have you ever walked down like Venice Beach and you see all like the pot doctors down there?
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And like you pay money, you go in and like there's, it's like, you know to say the right thing, you get a card, you know?
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And it's, unfortunately, it's kind of that model.
Guest:It's like that you pay a fee and you know what to say and they issue patents.
Guest:It's, and they don't have enough time to like really look at everything.
Guest:Like we,
Guest:Let me tell you a story about one of our most recent cases.
Guest:We're representing this couple that live in suburbs of Philly, and they run a website where they have a vote for your favorite photograph.
Marc:Yeah.
Guest:And they've been doing this since- Vote for your favorite photograph.
Guest:Yeah.
Marc:Generally?
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:It's just a fun site?
Guest:Yeah, yeah.
Guest:They just do it as a hobby.
Guest:They're not even a company.
Guest:They're not incorporated.
Guest:And they've been doing this since 2003.
Guest:And then they get sued in federal court by these guys that own a patent on voting for your favorite photo.
Guest:And a patent that they got in 2007...
Guest:um on like vote for your favorite thing on the internet yeah and as if that was a new thing in 2007 and you just you just bang your head against the table like how on earth is the patent office giving patents like that out this was something like you remember hot or not and like this is not something that was new it was probably not something that should ever have been patentable it's just a banal idea yeah and and they're handing this patent out in the late 2000s and it you know just because somebody did the paperwork
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:I mean, they get half a million applications a year.
Guest:So they're just overwhelmed.
Guest:And they don't really look.
Guest:They look at other patents and journal articles when they're looking for prior art, what we were talking about earlier.
Guest:And they don't really look on the Internet.
Guest:They don't really look at open source software.
Guest:So they miss a lot of stuff.
Marc:But is that a policy in order to keep the patent office vibrant and doing what it's supposed to be doing?
Marc:Or is it really just overwhelmed?
Guest:It's a mixture of both.
Guest:Back when I was in practice, we would do mock jury tests, which had trial in front of mock jurors, and they just love.
Guest:You hold something up and you say, the patent office looked at this, a professional reviewed this, and that's true, and it's very hard to get them to realize that it's a flawed process.
Guest:No.
Guest:An analogy I used to like to use was if someone holds up a driver's license, does that convince you that they're a good driver?
Guest:Right.
Guest:Like they were at fault.
Marc:Right.
Marc:And that's one of those things where, see, like these lawyers that represent these trolling companies, you know, they know the score.
Marc:So if you try to make an example of the process of the patent office, it's not really even admissible.
Marc:That's exactly right.
Marc:so so it's a game yeah it's like you know like hey you know we're not here the patent office isn't on trial this is you know this is what they do you know right so now what's going on now the reason you're here is i'm concerned yep so so you're telling me that dave logan and his office without a phone his mailbox
Marc:His mailbox business in Texas has appealed the patent on podcast.
Guest:Yeah, yeah.
Guest:They appealed out victory at the patent office, and it's at the federal circuit and the federal courts, and we're probably going to be arguing it in July.
Marc:So you think we have a good shot?
Guest:Yeah, I think so.
Guest:I think so.
Guest:I'm confident.
Guest:And I'm usually a pretty pessimistic guy.
Guest:If you might remember last time I was on, I depressed you a little.
Marc:Well, we're going to talk about a couple other things here with these stickers you brought me that are not necessarily patent related, but disconcerting.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:The Electronic Frontier Foundation.
Marc:These removable stickers are an unhackable anti-surveillance technology.
Marc:Place them over your laptop camera to frustrate hostile adversaries.
Marc:Are you telling me that people are recording me on the occasion that I may be masturbating to pornography?
Guest:I hope not, Mark, but it does happen.
Guest:That's a real thing.
Guest:People hack your laptop, and they put some malware there, and they get control of the camera.
Guest:And it's actually a pretty major problem.
Guest:They'll sell, they hack a bunch of computers, and then they get access, and then they'll sell that to creepy people who want access.
Guest:For blackmail.
Guest:No, no.
Guest:I mean, I think a lot of it's just people who- They just want to watch me working?
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:They want to watch me reading Twitter?
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:Yeah, yeah.
Marc:People have- There's a whole channel of me, like, you know, getting upset at tweets.
Marc:That's right.
Marc:That's right.
Marc:The Doc Web channel, Mark.
Marc:Yeah, yeah.
Marc:Mark Matt at tweets.
Marc:Mark not working.
Marc:Mark looking at things that he shouldn't.
Marc:But so that's, well, that's just creepy.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:Not necessarily.
Marc:It's creepy that it exists, but I don't know what they're really getting.
Yeah.
Guest:Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Guest:I think, you know, if you've got nothing better to do, it's the kind of thing to do.
Guest:But a sticker is a very easy way to defeat that atmosphere.
Guest:Well, thank you.
Marc:I'm going to put one of these on right now.
Marc:You have one on your phone, so you're a little cautious.
Marc:Yeah, that's right.
Marc:What other horrible things are happening in the hack world that can affect us regular people?
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Well, right now, I mean, the big battle that's been in the news has been Apple versus the government about the phone.
Guest:And that has been followed up with a bill that Senators Feinstein and Burr have proposed in Congress.
Guest:that would essentially require companies to make their technology insecure so that just in case the government needs to look they can and we're super concerned about that because our philosophy is this is already the golden age of surveillance the government has tons and tons of ways to look at what we're doing to spy on us yeah uh with or without a warrant and the the the
Guest:For them to make the phones less secure just in case they need to look at one particular phone is a really bad payoff.
Guest:We have a much bigger problem with identity theft.
Guest:Yeah, it's happened to me.
Guest:Identity theft.
Guest:Whoa, yeah.
Guest:I mean, that's a real thing that's happened to a lot of people.
Guest:Our view is there's always things that the government can't get.
Guest:If you have a conversation inside your house with the curtains closed and it turns out it later would be relevant to the government, they can't get that.
Guest:But you could bug everyone's house and send it to a server and the government say, well, we'll only look if we have a warrant.
Marc:Right.
Guest:And then, you know, but that would solve the going dark problem, which is what they call it, the going dark problem of people's private conversations in the house.
Guest:But we don't do that because, like, we value privacy, and the government doesn't get everything, right?
Guest:They have plenty of tools.
Guest:They have location.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Just good police work.
Guest:Yeah, good police work, like focus specifically on targets rather than mass surveillance.
Guest:That's the kind of message we push, that really what we want the government to be doing is to be focusing on targets where they have real evidence rather than just sweeping up everyone's Internet browsing, everyone's phone records, which they were doing for years and years, so that we have a government that's focused on actual problem people rather than treating everyone like a suspect.
Yeah.
Marc:Well, God damn it.
Marc:Are we being surveilled right now?
Guest:We are being recorded right now, Mark.
Marc:God, man, we got to take care of this shit.
Marc:That's crazy.
Marc:They can hear us right now.
Marc:Thanks for talking to me, man.
Marc:Thanks, Mark.
Marc:Thanks for having me on.
Marc:That was me and Daniel Naser.
Marc:And, you know, thank God.
Marc:Up to speed.
Marc:Now, look, folks, I do need to say that the EFF took this fight on when podcasters needed it the most.
Marc:And we're always going to be thankful for that.
Marc:WTF is making a donation to them right now to help keep them going throughout the year, and we want to sweeten the pot, folks.
Marc:If our listeners also make donations to the EFF, we will match every dollar you donate up to $5,000 in addition to our original donation.
Marc:They set up a page for you to do this.
Marc:Go to EFF.org slash WTF.
Marc:That's EFF.org slash WTF.
Marc:You can also find out when you go to EFF.org what else they're up to and why it's an important organization.
Marc:So let's give a little back to the defenders of podcasting.
Marc:Okay?
Marc:All right.
Marc:I'm going to talk to George Wolf, more theater stuff.
Marc:Very excited about the theater.
Marc:Very excited about the musical shuffle along or the making of the musical sensation of 1921 and all that followed, which is playing on Broadway at the music box theater.
Marc:I learned a lot.
Marc:I, I, I definitely was engaged with,
Marc:I knew nothing about it, not unlike Hamilton in some ways.
Marc:There's a history lesson, but the difference is that Hamilton was American history, founding father history.
Marc:Shuffle Along was really theater history, black entertainment history, entertainment history, the history of dance, musical innovation, of show business, and it was just...
Marc:A fascinating lesson that went all the way through.
Marc:This was a forgotten play that was a monumental event.
Marc:It was the first all black production on Broadway, which turned out to be kind of close to Broadway, not quite on Broadway, but it was it was just went gangbusters.
Marc:It was a huge success in 1921.
Marc:And then everybody in it, except for Yubi Blake, well, everyone went on to other things, but the impact of it became forgotten for a lot of different historical reasons.
Marc:It was a great show.
Marc:Great show.
Marc:And you know me and musicals.
Marc:I found it very moving, and I was very honored to have this conversation with George C. Wolfe in my hotel room in New York City.
Marc:The play is also nominated for 10 Tony Awards, including two for George, Best Book of a Musical, and Best Direction of a Musical.
Marc:So this is me talking to George C. Wolfe in New York City.
Marc:.
Marc:so the reason i'm nervous is i always feel a little insecure about theater about my knowledge of theater and what theater means and what it's supposed to be and how important it is all that shit oh who cares it's good you do it you do it you do it hopefully it's good hopefully people are engaged hopefully people take something home that's what you do
Marc:But when you started getting involved with theater, what was the passion?
Marc:Because I know it's a broad question, but it seems like a hard life in terms of people's attraction to it at this point in time.
Marc:It seems like it's New York.
Marc:That's it with theater.
Guest:No, no, no.
Guest:You won't take that.
Guest:No, I don't take that.
Guest:No, I don't know.
Guest:I mean, no, it's I mean, it's it's everything.
Guest:I mean, it's like theater almost died when the talkies came along.
Guest:And then theater almost died when TV came along.
Guest:And then theater almost died because of new technology.
Guest:And probably maybe one day it will die, but it's not dead yet.
Guest:And also Broadway is not theater.
Guest:Broadway is.
Guest:Broadway is Broadway and theater is done on Broadway.
Guest:But Broadway is about a whole bunch of stuff.
Guest:Broadway is about real estate.
Guest:Broadway is about awards.
Guest:Broadway is about ticket prices.
Guest:Broadway is about glamour.
Guest:And it's also about people, a lot of people who work very, very, very hard to do what they do.
Guest:And that's sort of what connects theater all over the world.
Guest:One of the things that I think...
Guest:I mean, originally, originally, I wanted to be like Walt Disney.
Guest:I was going to have an amusement park.
Guest:That was the plan?
Guest:That was the plan.
Guest:I was going to have an amusement park when I was eight or nine.
Guest:Did you picture the rides that you might have?
Guest:No, I still have the plans.
Guest:I still have the plans.
Guest:I drew up the plans.
Guest:Were there different lands?
Guest:Without question.
Guest:Oh my God, yes.
Guest:I still have them.
Guest:One name of one land in George Wolfe's amusement park.
Guest:It's called I'm Surviving in New York land.
Guest:I don't know.
Guest:And I'm stuck on that ride.
Guest:And so I knew that I needed a lot of money.
Guest:And so I'd watch TV and I'd watch, you know, the Dick Van Dyke show or that girl, any of those shows.
Guest:I know that when you came to New York, if you were an actor, you made a lot of money.
Guest:So I knew I needed to come to New York and struggle so I could make a lot of money so I could then have my amusement park.
Guest:You knew all that.
Guest:This is my thinking.
Marc:To be an actor.
Guest:To be an actor so I could get money so I could build my amusement park.
Guest:Sure.
Guest:And you have.
Guest:I saw one of the rides.
Guest:I went to the ride last week.
Guest:And it's probably at the end of the week.
Guest:And people who were in it would probably agree to you that it's a ride.
Guest:It was a good ride.
Guest:So that was that.
Guest:But then, you know what?
Guest:I think that...
Guest:You know, because, you know, my first Play Color Museum was done in 86 and I was been working and I sort of got out of college 10 years earlier.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And I suppose probably started when I was 12, 13.
Guest:I sort of, for lack of better words, the obsession began.
Guest:With theater.
Guest:With theater.
Guest:But over time, you know...
Guest:All the various reasons why you want to do it, like, you know, to have an impact in the world or to have a voice or do all that stuff that's really, really important.
Guest:Ultimately, at the end of the day, the thing that I love most about it is...
Guest:It creates this extraordinary, when it works really well, it creates this extraordinary sense of community.
Guest:A whole bunch of people who have nothing in common, except for maybe they're interested or they're ambitious or they want to get hired or whatever, come together in a room.
Guest:And if you can craft the right kind of environment, this astonishing community can grow.
Marc:And that's a community that extends to the backstage, the front of the house, the back of the house.
Guest:It keeps on growing.
Guest:First you add in designers, or producer designers, then you add in actors.
Guest:And that's sort of the core, because they're the people who are going to be with you on the journey.
Guest:And then it adds into everybody backstage, and it keeps on growing and growing.
Guest:And at the end of the day, that's sort of the...
Guest:That's the thing that I keep returning to that I love in a very intimate way about the making of theater.
Guest:You form these sort of contrived circumstances but authentic bonds with people.
Marc:And that includes the writer and then at some point the producer.
Guest:Actually, everybody.
Guest:And there's dysfunction as it exists inside of every community.
Guest:Really?
Guest:With the actors in theater?
Guest:I know.
Guest:It's shocking.
Guest:Actors in the Eagles for 100, Alex.
Guest:In this show, I'm blessed.
Guest:But also, I tend to have really, really, really good close relationships with actors because I love them and I love working with them.
Guest:And I think they're...
Guest:And you've worked with great actors.
Guest:I worked with some astonishing actors.
Guest:I mean, you've worked with the best in the world.
Marc:I would say that, yes.
Marc:Yes, I would say that, absolutely.
Marc:And when you, like, what I sort of want to do is, you know, while I have the show fresh in my head, because I, you know, I saw Shuffle Along.
Marc:Is there a longer title or the making of the musical sensation of 1921 and all that followed?
Marc:Yes.
Marc:Ta-da.
Marc:This struck me as the decision...
Marc:To take that review, to take Shuffle Along and sort of, you know, contextualize the entire history of black entertainment through it and with all of the – and also the sort of very real idea of things fading, of taking the metaphor of Shuffle Along to actually mean shuffling off this mortal coil.
Guest:Exactly, exactly.
Marc:To reinterpret the idea.
Guest:Exactly, exactly.
Marc:And that's the arc of the show.
Marc:Yeah, exactly.
Marc:Exactly.
Marc:It was genius, number one.
Marc:And number two, I learned a lot.
Marc:But there was also this idea of the shifting of how art works, of how art grows, and where it starts.
Marc:And in the world of black entertainment, that shift from where there was literally a shame
Marc:For the type of show that Shuffle Along was within years of it going on.
Marc:Yes, exactly.
Marc:And so they were not only just forgotten, but consciously erased.
Guest:Exactly, exactly.
Guest:After doing something that was culturally and monumentally significant.
Marc:And what made you, like, dig that up?
Marc:What made you say, like, this is going to be a big Broadway musical where, you know, we're going to show all of this historically.
Marc:We're going to educate.
Marc:We're going to create new music and new dances and have the theme be this show to be the foundation of another show about Black history in a way.
Marc:Well, I mean...
Guest:Thank God I didn't think that way because otherwise I never would have gone into the room.
Guest:But am I wrong?
Guest:No, but I'm saying, but when you start something, you have no idea what it is.
Guest:Of course.
Guest:So, I mean, because if I thought I was going to do all of that, I never would have walked through the little door.
Guest:you know because there's a little door there's a very tiny door I think when you agree to a project the door is very very tiny and you walk inside you go oh yeah this is just going to be easy and simple and a breeze and then you get inside and then the journey takes you where it wanted to
Marc:Well, what was the fascination with Shuffle Along?
Guest:Well, it sort of happened incrementally.
Guest:When I was in college, I developed this incredibly intense, huge obsession with Paul Robeson.
Guest:And I found that he had been a replacement in Shuffle Along.
Guest:Then at one point, I learned about Florence Mills, who was this international star, American star, and a black woman, which was sort of an impossibility to imagine throughout the 20s where everybody worshipped her all over.
Guest:Internationally.
Guest:Internationally.
Guest:She was a huge star.
Guest:Everywhere she went, people were going...
Guest:This is great artist.
Guest:My guess is she was probably Piaf meets Billie Holiday meets Judy Garland.
Marc:Right.
Guest:And some.
Guest:Right.
Guest:And Tiny.
Guest:And there's literally no recording of her voice.
Guest:Really?
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Just like Buddy Bolton.
Marc:Right.
Guest:There's no recording of this man.
Guest:That's right.
Guest:Who is considered.
Guest:So I'm just fascinated by these people who.
Marc:But he bowed pre-Louis Armstrong.
Guest:And it was considered sort of the link between secular music and jazz.
Guest:He's considered this crucial, crucial bone, if you will.
Guest:Michael Ondaatje wrote a book of poetry.
Guest:Yeah, it's wonderful.
Guest:Coming Through Slaughter.
Guest:Coming Through Slaughter, which I read at a crucial time in my life.
Guest:Right, right.
Guest:Yes, yes, yes.
Guest:And so...
Guest:um and and so and and then and then josephine baker and then i read that langston hughes went to columbia university because and then you know george g nathan who hated everything so you're running through your whole intellectual life this just didn't happen a year ago no absolutely absolutely and i so i keep on finding all these people who all these people uptown and downtown black and white low brown highbrow who formed this incredibly intense connection with this show yeah and i was going
Guest:That's fascinating.
Guest:That doesn't happen often because generally there are people who, if something is successful, they dismiss it because it's successful.
Guest:Right.
Guest:Sure.
Guest:And there were all these people who were attached to it.
Guest:And then in Gilbert Seldis' book, The Seven Lively Arts, he described, he used this phrase called a joyous rage, which I thought was just the most brilliant phrase ever.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And I think that's sort of been an emblematic energy that's informed Shuffle Along.
Guest:So I became really sort of interested and obsessed about it.
Guest:And then Scott Rude and I were talking about it because he wanted me to do something.
Guest:And I went, oh, I've been thinking about this show, Shuffle Along.
Guest:And I had worked with Savion Glover for about 10 years.
Guest:And then I read this fact that it was the first time that a women's chorus
Guest:were not decorative, that they danced and they were in active energy.
Guest:And I went, oh, this show was significant in terms of the evolution of the American musical.
Guest:So I want to know more.
Guest:And then I started digging, digging.
Guest:And then I started to find out about the people and the artists who made it.
Guest:And they were extraordinarily fascinating to me.
Guest:And so I always find it really fascinating
Guest:When really, really smart, complicated people create something that is less complicated than they are.
Guest:That tension is really fascinating to me because then you can look inside and realize there's something else more complicated going on inside of it.
Marc:Right, and a lot of us don't explore that deeply because what you're saying is – because that happens in a lot of mainstream entertainment.
Marc:100%.
Marc:There's a lot of frustrated, smart people going like, yeah, I lost control of that.
Guest:Exactly, exactly, exactly.
Guest:Or you put that many people together in one room, it's bound to not work.
Guest:Exactly.
Guest:You know what I mean?
Guest:So I became really, really fascinated by what happens when –
Guest:Because when you work on a show, wherever you are at that moment in your life, everything you have gets poured into it.
Guest:And so – and these people put together something that should not have worked and then worked and then was transformational.
Guest:And I read this really fascinating essay that because Shuffle Along was literally the first black musical to become commercially successful –
Guest:Every work that followed in many respects the tendency was to place it in the south because of shuffle along success and and everything I mean everything that followed that has any degree of black people in it is said in the south in the commercial landscape I think there are variations on it and I think that also like when you know when you talk about stealing or appropriation or You know white culture taken from black culture that I mean you went out of your way
Marc:To make it clear that Gershwin took the opening notes of I've Got Rhythm from the orchestra.
Guest:I did not.
Guest:Yubi Blake, this is not me, Yubi Blake tells this brilliant story.
Guest:Thank God he lived long enough to tell those stories.
Guest:Forever.
Guest:I remember him from my childhood.
Guest:Yes, of course.
Guest:Oh, my God, exactly.
Guest:You know, U.B.
Guest:Blake tells this extraordinary story because William Grant Steele, who wrote the theme song for the 1939 World's Fair and wrote all these operas, he's an extraordinary composer, played actually the oboe, not the clarinet.
Guest:I went through hell trying to find a jazz oboist to be in the pit.
Guest:We couldn't find one.
Marc:You couldn't find one?
Guest:We could not find one.
Guest:Not even someone good at faking?
Guest:Yeah, I don't know.
Guest:We ain't faking it.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:So, um, tells this story that, that, uh, that George Gershwin came to see the show repeatedly.
Guest:There's this man named Will Votere who did the vocal arrangements for this show with Lady Hard by Ziegfeld to do the vocal arrangements for a lot of his shows at the Ziegfeld Falls and also the vocal arrangements for, uh, Showboat and was at one time was the musical director for Fox films for about four years in Hollywood from 19, 1929 to 32, which is a sort of astonishing thing.
Guest:Uh,
Guest:But he would invite all these people over because he wanted to, for lack of better words, pick their brains.
Guest:And so Ubi tells a story that he bumps into Dooley Wilson, the guy from Casablanca, and he went, wait till you hear this new song that George Gershwin has written.
Guest:It's unbelievable.
Guest:And Dooley Wilson sat down with the sheet music and started to play the song, and Ubi Blake said, stop.
Stop.
Guest:got up, Yubi Blake sat down and played the rest of the tune.
Guest:Really?
Guest:And he's went, this is Yubi's story.
Guest:And he go, how do you know that?
Guest:He said, Grant Steele used to riff on that tune when he was in the pit of Shuffle Along.
Guest:And that story, so it's not my invention.
Guest:No, no, I know.
Guest:And that story I just thought was astonishing.
Marc:Sure, but not surprising.
Guest:Well, you know, hey, it's just like, you know, there's a fascinating quote, you know, talented people borrow, genius is still.
Guest:You know, of course she was a genius.
Guest:But it's just fascinating because at that time, because one of the things that I think was really, really, really, really fascinating about Shuffle Along, which is this show –
Guest:Langston Hughes considered it a catalyst for the Harlem Renaissance, not for the brilliance of the artists who gave forth, but this mixing.
Guest:The portal.
Guest:The portal.
Guest:Exactly.
Guest:This uptown and downtown meeting and connect.
Guest:Right.
Guest:You know, downtown and Harlem meeting and connecting.
Guest:And so it was this it was this explosive time where.
Guest:where people and this downtown elite white culture and uptown elite populist culture were connecting for the first time.
Guest:And, of course, when that sort of stuff happens, there's an incredible sort of like exchange of energy, idea, and possibility.
Guest:And I'm sure – and in some cases, it's very organic versus the situation where you have –
Guest:Big Mama Thornton versus Elvis Presley.
Guest:They're nothing but a hound dog.
Guest:You know, all that stuff is later.
Guest:But this was sort of in many respects, I think, sort of a a a a a very embryonic, extraordinary moment in Manhattan when the two worlds were meeting and connecting.
Marc:And also this show is about, as you were saying before, about the nature of Broadway, the nature of business.
Marc:And that has been roughly the same for years.
Marc:When you pointed out at the beginning of this conversation that Broadway's not about theater, it's about Broadway.
Marc:And it's sort of what's happening now, oddly, in Times Square.
Marc:Although when I lived here, we were all very upset that it was now becoming this light show.
Marc:But that was what it was originally.
Marc:Exactly.
Guest:Broadway is theater, but Broadway is...
Guest:It's like Hollywood is movies, but Hollywood is also a lot of other things.
Guest:And also because I don't want to in any way because I've worked on Broadway since I was probably 36 or 37.
Guest:So I love working there.
Guest:It's people making the work, and then it's lights, and then it's people coming there to be a part of this glamorous thing.
Guest:And generally the making of the thing is...
Guest:is the most unglamorous thing, because it's just wonderful hard work.
Marc:Right, and it's big shows, and it's always been, for every Long Day's Journey into Night, or for every Angels in America, there's been a Cats, and there's been a Lion King.
Guest:And I think the collision of all those dynamics are what make it interesting, when it just becomes one.
Guest:over the other, then it becomes complicated.
Guest:And I think the economics I'm making are very complicated.
Guest:But I remember once, I did this stunning, stunning play called Free Men of Color by John Gray at Lincoln Center.
Guest:And it was weirdly received.
Guest:And it's a masterpiece.
Guest:And I was like, that's it.
Guest:I'm done with Broadway.
Guest:I'm over it.
Guest:I'm over it.
Guest:I'm quitting.
Guest:And then somebody called me in to help out and transform this production of The Normal Heart, Larry Kramer's astonishing play.
Guest:And it ended up having...
Guest:This extraordinary impact and people were there sobbing nightly and people who had gone through the AIDS crisis, who had lost friends were releasing energy that they couldn't release at the time because you became numb after so many of your friends dying.
Guest:And a whole new generation was there.
Guest:And Larry was outside handing out pamphlets about the war is still on.
Guest:And all of a sudden, I went from going, oh, I'm sad, I'm cynical, I'm walking away.
Guest:All of a sudden, I was inside of this experience, which was transformational.
Guest:And people were going, thank you, I love it.
Guest:So Broadway can surprise you.
Guest:And that's also the power of theater.
Guest:100%.
Guest:But also the power of theater, just in terms of transforming people, but also transformed me in the middle of, you know, singing.
Guest:Your cynicism.
Guest:Yeah, my cynicism and standing on the corner singing Stormy Weather.
Guest:Can't go on.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And that's it.
Guest:I'm done.
Guest:I'm over it.
Guest:And then all of a sudden, oh, my God, I love Broadway.
Guest:So it's just that you go through it.
Guest:And that's actually one of the reasons why I wanted to do Shuffle Along because I wanted to live inside of that.
Guest:That stupid naivete that I had when I first came to the city, which is I want to make something and I want to be a working theater artist.
Guest:I want to have a Broadway show.
Guest:I want to have that career.
Marc:And that's what you're thinking going into this.
Guest:I wanted to revisit.
Marc:But it's interesting that, you know, where, you know, you have that juncture of art and your own personal life where, you know, you became cynical with Broadway.
Marc:And at the moment, I imagine you saw the response of Normal Heart.
Marc:That was the moment where you realized that there's a selflessness that is necessary to service what theater is capable of.
Guest:Well, yeah, but it's also, I just think it's just, it's like every single time you do a play, you fall in love.
Guest:Right.
Guest:And you want the world to love who you love.
Guest:Right.
Guest:And then when the world doesn't love who you love the way you want them to, it hurts.
Guest:It hurts your heart.
Guest:I have never lost, and I, God willing, knock on wood, will never lose the joy of the making.
Marc:Right.
Guest:Because I love to make.
Guest:Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Guest:I love to make things, and I love to play with people in a room, you know, and make something that is scary and dangerous and fun.
Guest:So I'm not going to let anything invade that.
Marc:Right.
Marc:So if we walk through your tenure at the public, you know, where I guess most of this stuff started at the public and then moved?
Guest:Is that how it works?
Marc:Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Marc:So to go from Jelly's Last Jam to working with Tony Kushner on Angels in America, that's a pretty big jump, right?
Marc:No.
Marc:Not really?
Marc:No.
Marc:Tony asked me to do it because of Jelly's Last Jam, so it couldn't be that much of a jump.
Marc:Tell me a little bit about Tony's process, because he, to me, is this incredible genius that I've seen him on the street, and I had to stop just to look at him.
Marc:Like, that's him.
Marc:That's the guy that writes him.
Marc:That's funny.
Marc:Because he's a real poet and he runs very deep and operates on a lot of levels.
Marc:How is that collaboration?
Marc:How did that work with you guys?
Guest:It was great.
Guest:He's one.
Guest:He's a dear, dear friend of mine.
Guest:And I mean, it was it was a very joyful collaboration with a thing which is ironic enough.
Guest:I was at the I was at NYU.
Guest:I went to NYU in the dramatic writing program, also musical theater program, and he was there as a director.
Guest:Uh-huh.
Marc:And you ended up directing.
Guest:I ended up directing Asian American, you know, and at the end time, I was put on the wait list at NYU as a director, which I perfectly remind them of this fact.
Guest:But, you know, it was a wonderful game because we've worked together on then Carolina Change.
Guest:I saw that.
Guest:And various other projects.
Guest:So it's a joyful collaboration.
Guest:So I think what we have in common is the sense that theater has a responsibility that theater should empower theater.
Guest:that theater should question, that theater should assault, that theater should be entertaining, that theater should be aggressive and delicate.
Guest:So I think we share that.
Guest:I think we have incredible intense respect and I think love of each other.
Guest:And I think that...
Guest:That there was a tremendous part one had appeared to great acclaim and part one to part two was very much so in process.
Guest:And I am very ferocious and very protective of the work.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:I am very ferocious and very protective of actors and artists who I work with, and space must be given so that the work can happen.
Guest:Part two, the perestroika was being written.
Guest:And I said, you just go away and do that.
Guest:Do that.
Guest:You can do that.
Guest:We will protect you.
Guest:I will protect you.
Guest:And not from anybody being vicious, but just expectations were so high.
Guest:So one of the things which I always say, I never...
Guest:I was never able to experience the thrill that people experience when they saw Angels, but I was able to hear new words and new speeches from that show, and I heard them first.
Guest:And I go, oh, that's clear.
Guest:That's not clear.
Guest:What about this?
Guest:What about this?
Guest:So it was a lovely collaboration.
Marc:Yeah, and it's such a profound and, you know,
Marc:dark and embracing play i mean like you know like i guess there's no way to explain to me or to anybody you know where someone like tony kushner gets inspired to to use roy cone as a centerpiece yeah yeah play about aids yeah
Marc:And then when I saw Caroline, you know, that was not unlike Shuffle Along framed in a context that everybody could understand.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:But having a depth that that was transcends.
Guest:Exactly.
Guest:Exactly.
Guest:But that's I mean, I think that's that's the thing which I think is interesting about the it's like in a play.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:It takes, depending on the quality of the play, it takes three minutes, three to five to maybe 10 minutes to build trust with an audience.
Guest:In a musical, you can build trust with three notes because everybody surrenders to rhythm and music.
Guest:Now, what I've always been intrigued, why the form intrigues me, but it's incredibly hard.
Guest:And so this is the first musical I've done in...
Guest:10 years i'm maybe even because noise funk was 20 years ago because it the form is so hard that what makes it hard just because of the undertaking with the well because it's it's no because it's it's 27 000 it's you know there's a book writer there's a lyricist there's a composer there's a book writer in a in a in a musical because he wrote the book for last night's show that i saw for shuffle along what is the book exactly who
Guest:Well, the book is the dialogue, but the book is more than the dialogue.
Guest:The book is crafting the libretto, the scenario.
Guest:So the architecture of the piece is primarily, probably though not exclusively, crafted by the book writer.
Guest:So as a book writer, it was my vision to...
Guest:to include this story in relationship to this story in relationship to this story.
Guest:And you must do so with an extraordinary economy.
Guest:It's probably in some respects
Guest:it has the intellectual rigor that, that, that you have when you're writing a play.
Guest:Right.
Guest:But it also has the craft like economy of a screenplay.
Guest:Right.
Guest:Or as, or as I, or as simply because you have, it has to be sparse so that therefore the images are so large.
Guest:Right.
Guest:And the other scenario, or as I describe book writing is, you know, the book writer does all the floor play, the foreplay.
Guest:Right.
Guest:And the composer and the lyricist get to have the orgasm.
Guest:Yeah.
Marc:And also with this book, you had to struggle to integrate all the music of the original show, add new music, and then kind of deconstruct the show, build a new show on top of it.
Marc:Yes, exactly.
Marc:That is the backstory of the show, and have that exist as a musical.
Guest:Yeah, and then craft the scenario, and then all that happens.
Guest:So it's a deeply unrewarding thing, but deeply, but I mean, I really love it because
Guest:It's hard, and it's hard, and you have to do it with extraordinary economy, so you have to say so much with a finite amount of time and energy.
Marc:What's beautiful about this new show is that at intermission,
Marc:in some ways you've told the whole story already.
Marc:Yes.
Marc:And that the entire second act is sort of bringing the dance numbers and the music up to current date and then sort of reflecting on the rest of these people's lives.
Guest:Exactly, exactly.
Guest:And also as a result, hopefully when you look back on one, act one, your perceptions change because act one to me is about doing what you do
Guest:no matter what because of the love of the doing right and act two is about this incredibly primal thing that everybody begins to think about when they get past 40 will i be remembered for the best of what i did or at all or at all or at all and the most there's this most astonishing thing happened on opening night noble sisal's daughter yeah
Guest:who I met, who was there, their family was there, came up to me and she said, she said, my father, when he, I hope I'm gonna get this right, but she said, my father toward the end of his life said, I'm not scared of dying when I'm terrified is no one will remember me.
Guest:And it's just, you know, and that's just sort of, and the final, one of the final numbers in the song, one of the final songs is They Won't Remember You.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:They won't remember you.
Guest:And he sings it.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And the four of them sing it in the final.
Guest:The people are singing it at them.
Guest:History is singing it at them in the form of Carl Van Vecten.
Marc:But see, the thing that you did that I realized after I saw it and thinking about this conversation was that you dug these people up.
Marc:Yes.
Marc:And you gave them context.
Marc:and you gave them their place in history and their place in American history and the history of theater and modern entertainment.
Guest:Yes, yes.
Guest:And because they deserve it, because they deserve it.
Guest:We talk about Oklahoma, we talk about West Side Story, we talk about Showboat.
Guest:Oklahoma's reputed the first real musical.
Guest:It was considered a sophisticated musical where there's an integration of song and dance all contributing toward telling the story.
Guest:Showboat is considered the first sort of adult
Guest:sophisticated musical.
Guest:West Side Story was considered lifting the bar in terms of the sophistication of all the elements combined together.
Guest:And as far as I'm concerned, Shuffle Along was crucial because it, if for no other reason, if you think about George M. Cohen and the squareness of his sense of rhythm versus by virtue of Shuffle Along bringing jazz, i.e.
Guest:syncopation, altered the soundscape of the American musical.
Marc:But it is interesting that, you know, you were able to sort of put this into, you know, a source point for the shifting of Broadway.
Marc:Yeah, yeah.
Marc:And this is like, tell me how the economics of Broadway sort of works, because this is sort of a bold thing to do, what you did, right?
Marc:I guess.
Yeah.
Marc:But you want it to be a mainstream show.
Marc:Yeah, I want it to be, yes.
Marc:And it seems to be doing beautifully, right?
Marc:People are very excited about it.
Guest:Yes, we are thrilled so far.
Marc:Now tell me a little bit about the original Shuffle Along.
Marc:Because what I really liked in your show was that there was this...
Marc:a lot of attention paid to to doing the work and doing it in a very compromised way and doing it on the road and doing it with with with little respect from from producers and maybe no money but there was this joy in doing it and this horrendous process of getting that thing in shape but hadn't they gone through all that by the time they got here it wouldn't have been what it
Guest:Exactly, exactly.
Guest:It was so tight.
Guest:Exactly.
Guest:And also the thing which is interesting, they opened up in May, which No Show opens up in May because this was pre-air conditioning.
Guest:And those buildings, you know, so it was swelteringly hot in those buildings.
Guest:And they came in and nobody knew what it was.
Guest:And they were at a theater on 63rd Street.
Guest:which is far from 42nd Street.
Guest:And nobody was famous.
Guest:Nobody was connected to anybody in that show.
Guest:And they were just grappling together.
Guest:And they came in $18,000 in debt, which is the equivalent of $200,000 or $300,000.
Guest:So everything was conspired to make this show a flop.
Guest:And it ended up running for 504 performances.
Guest:There were three touring companies.
Guest:And mixed audiences.
Guest:Totally, totally.
Guest:It integrated Broadway because there was a heretofore rule that if black people came to Broadway, they would sit in the balcony.
Guest:And there was an article in Variety at the time which points out that Negroes at Shuffle Along were seated as close as fifth row from the front.
Guest:That's an article in Variety.
Guest:And that was shocking.
Guest:Well, it's shocking and probably celebratory this is happening.
Guest:And then what happened then when Shuffle Along was a big hit and it went on tour, it toured into white venues.
Guest:And therefore, as it toured around, it inadvertently integrated every single theater it played in.
Guest:That's an important historical milestone.
Guest:I mean, everything even so silly as that 63rd Street in 1921 was a two way street.
Guest:But because the traffic was so heavy on 63rd Street, because so many people are going to see it, it became a one way street.
Guest:Because of that.
Guest:Because of Shuffle Along.
Guest:And so when's the last time the show changed the traffic patterns in New York City?
Guest:I ask you that.
Guest:So it's, to my mind, film is about story.
Guest:TV is about character.
Guest:And theater is about ideas.
Guest:You watch a story in the theater, but what you take home are these ideas.
Guest:Hopefully these ideas about America.
Guest:So people are watching brilliant artists and a very entertaining show.
Guest:But hopefully what you're taking home...
Guest:Our thoughts about American culture and how it transforms and devours and elevates all the time.
Guest:And you're also taking home the idea of the frailty of ambition and the frailty of success and the frailty of waking up one day and figuring out it's not your time anymore.
Guest:right so hopefully you take that home and you ingest it and allow it to live inside of your body but you're watching the journey of the making of or you're watching over with this will these two teams ever get back together right but but also in a general sense that you're you're watching it unfold you know with spit and and 100% movement and there's no distance exactly you and the performers like you know I but one of the things that I think is so fascinating is
Guest:When a movie is really having a tremendous impact on you, you lean back in your seat.
Guest:When a play is really working, you lean forward in your seat.
Guest:Because you're seeing something that is in the same proportion as you are.
Guest:You're seeing your own frailty on stage.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:I'm overwhelmed and I don't go to a lot.
Marc:And like, you know, I've talked about it before.
Marc:If I go see a musical, I'm usually tearing up just because there's so many people singing.
Guest:Exactly.
Guest:Well, because it has the power.
Marc:It has that power.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:I just don't even know what that is.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:And it happened last night a few times, but also what you're talking about, the depth of relating.
Marc:Precisely.
Marc:Precisely.
Marc:And the fascinating thing about Shuffle Along is that at the end, when these characters are talking about their own depths and their lives that led up to, as they shuffle off the stage before the final piece...
Marc:The sadness is tempered by a sort of respect and what you've grown to embrace these people.
Marc:A lot of them, it sounded hard, and it was vague enough to not be too tragic necessarily, but you were able to sort of accept it without being like, oh, this is horrible.
Guest:And the series of years.
Guest:But also with the series of years, it's very interesting because...
Guest:I didn't even know what I was doing when I just wrote the list of years.
Guest:I did all the research and someone said, they said, all of a sudden the piece became real for me because I was alive then when they were alive.
Guest:Well, even me remembering UB Blake from when I was a kid.
Guest:Absolutely.
Marc:And he ends up the last guy on stage, and he's sort of like, he knows it.
Marc:There's a tone that's sort of uplifting and comedic.
Marc:Yes, exactly.
Marc:And you're sort of like, well, that is life.
Marc:Yes, exactly.
Guest:That guy's the lucky one.
Guest:Exactly, exactly.
Guest:He who lives longest tells the story.
Marc:That's right.
Marc:Exactly.
Marc:Yeah, I thought it was great, and it did all the things you said.
Marc:And you were even able to bring...
Marc:uh, the elections into it in a, in, in a, in a fairly, uh, kind of, uh, you know, eternal, but, but, but irrelevant way.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:That, you know, this sort of excitement around an election, which the original shuffle along was sort of a sub story.
Guest:Exactly.
Guest:Exactly.
Guest:And also one of my favorite lines in, in the piece is,
Guest:which is, uh, which, uh, Fiona Miller, Brian Stokes Mitchell says this line.
Guest:He says, shuffle along celebrates that most American of freedoms, the right to vote for the wrong candidate.
Marc:Right.
Marc:Exactly.
Marc:And also it's loaded up because, you know, the, the context of, of the black experience around voting exactly that at that time, you know,
Guest:It was a dangerous event.
Guest:Very dangerous.
Guest:A very dangerous event.
Guest:And that's one of his arguments that we were exploring substance in the context of this delightful little show.
Guest:We were existing in defiance of the order of the day.
Guest:And theater should exist in defiance of the order of the day.
Marc:And now I want to talk about, because with Angels of America, again, that was one of those plays where you're staging of having, who was in the original?
Marc:Who was the original Roy Cohn?
Marc:Ron Liebman.
Guest:Oh, yeah, that's who I saw.
Guest:Brilliant, brilliant.
Guest:Amazing.
Guest:Brilliant.
Guest:The whole cast, Marsha Gay Harden, Jeffrey Wright, Kathleen Chalfan.
Guest:Jeffrey Wright, yeah.
Guest:You know, it's just, you know, Stephen Spinella, Joe Mantel.
Guest:I mean, just Ella McLachlan, everybody.
Guest:It was the most astonishing, glorious, glorious, glorious, glorious cast.
Marc:But that staging of him in the bed center stage is what I remember.
Marc:And you had this monster that you're telling an audience to feel empathy for, to understand their own feelings about AIDS and about gayness in general and about fear was amazing.
Marc:And when you decide to do these moments where you're like, that bed's going to sit right there and that's all that's going to be on the stage.
Marc:What was that thinking?
Guest:Oh, God, that's 27,000 years ago.
Guest:I don't know.
Guest:It's just images.
Guest:It's very interesting.
Marc:It's your craft, and it's hard to explain.
Guest:But also images.
Guest:It's very interesting because at one point, this is completely not angels, but in Normal Heart, it ends up with, I have these two images of,
Guest:I wanted to show the progression of what was happening with ASN.
Guest:First time, there were like 21 names.
Guest:And then at the end of the act, the names are crawling.
Guest:And at the end, I wanted to put names all over the theater, on people, on the entire scenery.
Guest:And so I had that image, and I knew that image very, very early on.
Guest:But there's one of the final scenes is the doctor marries...
Guest:the two main characters and when one is in bed and about ready to die.
Guest:And I kept on avoiding, I mean, that cast was so heroic because we did that show in a finite amount of time, but I kept on going, okay, when do you want the bed?
Guest:And I'm going, I don't want the bed.
Guest:I don't know.
Guest:And I kept on, I don't want to stage it.
Guest:I kept on avoiding staging and I kept on avoiding staging it.
Guest:And I didn't quite know why.
Guest:But then I went, oh, I'm gonna stage it with him standing and his partner holding his hand behind his bed and he becomes the pillow because I wanted to magnify the fragility of the moment.
Guest:I knew this, but I didn't know this.
Guest:And so if you live inside, if you live inside the material,
Guest:A deeper part of your brain is seeing something and you just got to get out of the way so that therefore those images can come through.
Guest:So the images from Angels or the image from Normal Heart or any of the images from Carolina Change, I've got to move.
Guest:my contrived brain out of the way so that these images that are living, that are coming from a deeper, more subliminal place and are coming from a primal place inside of myself can emerge.
Guest:So in many respects,
Guest:And as time goes on, I've gotten really, really good at not forcing myself to know something.
Guest:Because if I don't know it yet, it's not because I don't know it.
Guest:It's because something deeper and smarter within me is emerging.
Guest:And so I take that pressure off of myself.
Guest:Right.
Guest:To allow an image to reveal myself as opposed to making myself know something.
Guest:Because if I make myself know something too soon, it's going to be a recycled image.
Guest:It's going to be a recycled truth.
Guest:Oh, I see.
Guest:And I don't want to do that.
Guest:Right.
Guest:I don't want to do that.
Guest:So when I was speaking earlier about protecting artists, I'm also very protective of my own process as well.
Marc:Right.
Guest:So that therefore I don't back myself into a corner and demand something.
Guest:I know something sooner than I need to know it.
Marc:That's interesting.
Marc:And you don't know what the timeline is on that.
Marc:Sometimes you don't, exactly.
Marc:You just hope it happens before you run out of time.
Guest:Exactly.
Guest:And there's certain times, certain images, certain images I instantly knew.
Guest:Working on Jelly's Last Jam, I had this image very early on that...
Guest:that I wanted to explore this relationship between Jelly Roll Morton and his girlfriend, Anita, through a series of post-sex conversations.
Guest:And it became a number called Loving is a Low Down Blues.
Guest:And it was just very hot and very sexual and very raw and very intimate.
Guest:And that image instantly came for me.
Guest:And so there are times where I will get an instant image, and I know it's startling and fresh.
Guest:And then there are other times I will go, you're going to show up?
Guest:You plan on showing up sometime today?
Guest:Hello, hello.
Guest:I'm knocking on the door.
Guest:You're there.
Guest:I'm being patient.
Guest:Hurry up.
Marc:But you have enough confidence in your craft to know that it'd probably come.
Guest:Yeah, it is.
Guest:It's craft, but it's also something else.
Guest:It's interesting.
Guest:It's hard to explain.
Guest:A daughter's saying, I just want to be remembered.
Guest:And a week earlier, because that number is a week old, we end up putting in a number, they won't remember you.
Guest:And you were tapped in.
Guest:You knew that you were tapped in.
Guest:Who knows?
Guest:Who knows?
Guest:But when she said that, I thought a hole was going to blow in the back of my head.
Guest:And there are just certain moments that I think it's about creating...
Guest:I remember I tell this story often.
Guest:I was working on a play in college and it had music connected to it.
Guest:It wasn't a musical.
Guest:And I was over talking to the composer and the cast was on a break and they were over there making noise.
Guest:And I was just like, come on, guys, get quiet.
Guest:We're working.
Guest:And I'm over there and I was talking to the body and they kept on making noise.
Guest:And I said, come on, come on, come on.
Guest:And then at one point, just as I was about ready to get annoyed, they were over in a corner and they had solved the moment.
Guest:And so that's the wonderful thing, going back to that sense of community.
Guest:If you have the right energy in the room and we have wonderful, smart people, anyone can have the answer.
Guest:Right.
Guest:And you just be willing to collaborate.
Guest:Well, not willing.
Guest:It's one of the joys.
Guest:If everybody is vulnerable to the moment, the solution is there.
Marc:And I was sort of I'm always excited because, you know, when you hear people that young people are like, you know, I want to be a dancer.
Marc:That's there's still a place for it.
Marc:Yes, absolutely.
Marc:Yes.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:And there are so many amazing dancers in the show.
Guest:And it's so and they're so like the youngest one is 22.
Guest:And they're just so they're they're.
Marc:they're brave and they're beautiful and they're hard-working and oh you gotta be oh my god oh my god it was a beautiful moment last night were you at the show last night no i wasn't oh that uh you know when um uh adrian warren is had the cigarette she comes out with the cigarette holder uh like right when she walked out the cigarette fell out and it's on the floor burning i get very hung up on that
Marc:Yeah, I love it.
Marc:Because there's part of me that's sort of like, I hope no one steps on that.
Marc:Is someone going to do something about that?
Marc:And then at some point, she's going on and she doesn't have to drag off it so she doesn't notice.
Marc:But I was wondering how they acknowledge that.
Marc:Because I always like those weird little human moments.
Marc:Oh, that's funny.
Marc:And she doesn't talk much and she's sort of in the background.
Marc:But she did find a place to go like, I lost my cigarette.
Marc:And then one of the dancers who was kneeling on over here picked up the cigarette and gave it to her so she could hold it again.
Marc:And I love that they had to deal with it.
Marc:Oh, absolutely.
Marc:Absolutely.
Marc:Absolutely.
Marc:Absolutely.
Marc:It was a great moment.
Marc:So to finish up a little bit, how do you work with actors?
Marc:You've worked with Meryl Streep.
Marc:You've worked with Jeffrey Wright.
Marc:You've worked with Patrick Stewart.
Marc:You've worked with all this cast, the musical cast.
Marc:I mean, how do you enter that relationship?
Marc:I mean, you know who you're working with.
Marc:Yeah.
Guest:No, but I mean, to me, I think there are...
Guest:I think there are two fundamental schools of directing.
Guest:You either stand where you are and demand people come to you or you go to where they are and then engage, talk.
Guest:seduce, question, and then take them on the journey of where you think they, as their character, should end up.
Guest:The first one is much more efficient.
Guest:The second one is much harder, but it's much richer because...
Guest:Because what you're doing, they have actors, every single person on the planet has secrets from having lived on the planet as long as they've lived on.
Guest:And so that if you create a healthy, clean environment, and I don't mean clean by any way other than where it's not about your ego or your will, if you create an environment where they feel safe, they will not just bring...
Guest:deliver on the role but they will deliver their secrets that they know as human beings and so and then audience can feel that and audience can feel when they're in the presence of that my sister said something really fascinating she said she said i she said she was there on open night she says at times i felt like i wasn't watching actors she felt like i was watching those people yeah and and there were moments and it's interesting when you're in previews you sit toward
Guest:the back of the theater so you don't make a silly spectacle of yourself when you're screaming and yelling and writing down notes.
Guest:So on opening night, I said, close to the stage, Ard McDonnell complained.
Guest:She said, close.
Guest:I saw you as soon as I walked out on stage and it was very annoying.
Guest:But I was watching that close and I was seeing
Guest:All the dancers work and all the conversations that we had in the room, they were invested in every single moment that they were on stage.
Guest:They were not just coming out there doing steps because one of the things I said to them over and over at any given moment
Guest:Everybody in this play is telling the story.
Guest:The audience is watching every single thing you do.
Guest:So you're either committed to elevating the material, because if you're not committed, then you're lowering the standard of the material.
Guest:And they had all invested in that.
Guest:And they had all claimed lovely, special, wonderful moments.
Guest:So I felt so proud because I felt as though...
Guest:All the work that we had been doing allowed them to feel like it was everybody.
Guest:It was their show.
Guest:Okay.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And that makes sense.
Guest:And ownership.
Guest:I mean, and also I read, I'm trying to remember who it was.
Guest:I read this French film director.
Guest:I'm trying to remember who it was who said,
Guest:the one the second you spit you you you attack an actor's spirit they never recover they never trust you again the same way they just a part they will do the work they will do the job but they never a part of their spirit will never ever trust you again
Guest:And that's where you get that.
Marc:You protect the process and the vulnerability.
Marc:Precisely.
Marc:Exactly.
Guest:Exactly.
Guest:And so I work very hard in never allowing my own fear or damage or doubt to cloud the room.
Guest:I work very, very hard on that.
Guest:I will never forget.
Guest:I saw...
Guest:i was in i was in an ice cream uh parlor one time and there was a young father there with his with his wife and she was pregnant and they had three children yeah and and i saw and he told everybody could buy whatever they want and they had a limited amount of money and the kids being kids ordered the most expensive thing and he became very frustrated and embarrassed so he then yelled at the wife
Guest:And the wife then yelled at the oldest kid.
Guest:And the oldest kid then yelled at the smallest kid.
Guest:And you just saw this dynamic of if you abuse, it doesn't leave the room.
Guest:It gets spread around.
Guest:It gets spread around.
Guest:And so that therefore, if you bring unnecessary energy into the room, it doesn't leave.
Guest:It just spreads around.
Marc:And the opposite of that is something that in talking to you, I realize that even if theater...
Marc:As we know it, Broadway or whatever, that the ideas and experiences that happen there eventually, not unlike Shuffle Long, begin to inform the entire culture.
Marc:Precisely.
Marc:Exactly.
Marc:Even if no one sees the play that is out there somewhere.
Marc:Precisely.
Marc:That those conversations and those emotions spread out.
Guest:Exactly.
Guest:All around the world.
Guest:It's spread out all around the world.
Guest:I mean, there was this – exactly.
Guest:And it alters peoples.
Guest:It alters in very subtle ways.
Guest:It was so fascinating.
Guest:There was this story that after Shuffle Around was a big hit in New York.
Guest:It went to Boston.
Guest:And all these –
Guest:black people were showing up and buying tickets for the show and the theater the theater owners were wondering if they're going to have an all-black audience but it turned out all these very wealthy white people had sent their chauffeurs and their butlers to buy the tickets
Guest:But it's just the phenomenon of that.
Guest:And I don't know what that was, whether that was just convenience, whether that was embarrassment.
Guest:I have no idea.
Guest:But it was just, it's like, I love the idea of all these black people.
Guest:They're buying tickets for this quote unquote black show for their white employees to come see it.
Guest:There's already some kind of weird, odd dialogue beginning to happen.
Guest:Really?
Guest:And that just happened?
Guest:No, no, this was back in 1970.
Guest:1921 because no not now.
Guest:Yeah, no, no, no in my mind because like Boston is not one of the more strangely still segregated 100% exactly No, this was like 1920 like 1922 when it not 22.
Guest:That's hilarious So it's just it's it's really is just fascinating how these little subtle differences how we can how it can reverberate how you know, it's a conversation of angels how whatever, you know Whatever show fun home Hamilton, whatever it is.
Guest:I don't care what it is.
Guest:It begins to
Guest:there is this trickle around.
Marc:Yeah, and also like, you know, with Angels and, you know, in light of the AIDS crisis that, you know, however it managed to change dialogue around that and then ultimately becomes an HBO piece, and then it just sort of, it keeps building the conversation sometimes later than it should, but it does.
Marc:Exactly.
Marc:It forms everything.
Marc:Not unlike in Shuffle Along where, you know, that changed theater.
Guest:It changed completely and totally changed Broadway.
Guest:And now because, you know, may our revival run for a long time because it's like now and now these names that should be known are being known again.
Marc:And also people like me are going to go home and look up these people and engage in the history of it and learn something.
Marc:And working with Savion Glover again, that must have been great.
Guest:He's like the tap guy.
Guest:He is the tap guy.
Guest:He's like the tap guru.
Guest:I think I met Savion when he was 17.
Guest:Uh-huh.
Guest:You know, because he was in Jelly.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:You know, and then we worked together on, and then he was in Jelly on tour.
Guest:And then when I took over the public, I said, come make a show here.
Guest:And then he said, well, I'm going to make it with you.
Guest:And then as a result of it, and I'd recently been to see a Knicks game, and I saw...
Guest:the rhythm how rhythm was controlling the crowd and I went oh I want to play around with making an audience from the time they sit down to the end respond to a rhythm so that they realize they are part of the rhythm and they are connected to the rhythm and noise funk sort of grew from that phenomenon
Guest:And it happened in that show in Shuffle Along as well.
Marc:It's 100%.
Guest:Did he do all the choreography?
Guest:He did all the choreography, yes.
Marc:It was stunning.
Marc:It was stunning.
Marc:Yes.
Marc:Well, I think we covered it.
Marc:Okay.
Marc:A lot.
Marc:Do you?
Marc:I feel good.
Marc:I feel good.
Marc:Your brain was working.
Marc:Yeah, I guess so.
Marc:Sometimes, mostly.
Marc:We didn't do a lot of where you come from and what your experience was getting into theater.
Marc:Let's do a little of that.
Marc:Okay.
Marc:Where did you come from?
Marc:I'm from Frankfurt, Kentucky.
Marc:Is that mid-Kentucky?
Guest:It's probably about an hour.
Guest:No, it's northern.
Guest:I guess it's probably an hour and a half or something like that from Cincinnati.
Guest:It's the capital.
Guest:It's a very tiny little town.
Guest:Big family?
Guest:Yes.
Guest:Not big family.
Guest:Four brothers and sisters.
Guest:Three.
Guest:Yes, I'm the fourth one.
Guest:And my town was segregated for the first five years of my life.
Guest:The first probably seven years of my life.
Guest:Do you remember that?
Guest:I was so protected from that, but I remember very specifically Martin Luther King, there was a march on Franklin and Martin Luther King came to town and my grandmother, who was a formidable figure, took me out of school and we marched.
Guest:We marched across the bridge up to the state capitol where he spoke.
Guest:And then there's this wonderful story that my cousin Teresa tells that she was, by this time, all of the school systems were integrated.
Guest:And my cousin was probably like in sixth grade.
Guest:And she and a friend of hers went to see Martin Luther King speak.
Guest:And then they said, okay, well, let's go back and we're going to be suspended now.
Guest:Okay.
Guest:And this because they had been warned that if they took left school, they were going to be suspended.
Guest:And this and this man said, what did you say?
Guest:And they said, well, our principal told us that if we left, we were going to be suspended.
Guest:He said, come with me.
Guest:And then he took them backstage to Martin Luther King.
Guest:They got in the car.
Guest:Martin Luther King then drove to Second Street School and knocked on the principal's door and went in and talked to him.
Guest:And then they were not suspended.
Guest:So these just sort of wonderful, wonderful, wonderful stories.
Guest:So all the stories that I was told and all the stories that were shared with me were not go down Moses powerless stories.
Guest:They were all stories of people in defiance of and celebration of community.
Guest:So all of this stuff was passed on to me.
Guest:And so I felt very protected it was happening.
Guest:The one thing that I remember very specifically that I viewed my grandmother as this formidable person who no one could stop.
Guest:And she was incredibly very protective of me.
Guest:When 101 Dalmatians came to Frankfurt, it was playing at the Capitol Theater.
Guest:And the Capitol Theater was the segregated theater.
Guest:And there was the Grand where the black people sat in the balcony.
Guest:and then the white people and generally the white lower class people sat down on the first floor and I wanted to see 101 Dalmatians going back to my Disney obsession and my grandmother calling up and wanting to know the showtimes and explaining that she was colored or Negro, whatever word she told, and they told her she couldn't bring me.
Guest:And so that was sort of the first time
Guest:seeing being in the presence of this person who was like a superhero who was like Thor or whatever who could knock down walls that I saw there was a wall that she couldn't knock down.
Marc:Yeah, and in all everything he just said in those two minutes
Marc:Are the themes of how you approach theater, protection, defiance, and community.
Marc:Exactly.
Marc:It's very interesting.
Marc:Very much so.
Marc:And it was put in that with community, we have protection, and it's our job to defy.
Guest:Exactly.
Guest:And that's how I was raised.
Guest:I was raised to be, I call it an integration warrior.
Guest:I was trained to invade.
Guest:Right.
Guest:I was trained to invade rooms.
Guest:And then once I got in the room, it wasn't enough that I was in the room.
Guest:I had to open the doors and redefine the texture of the room.
Guest:That was my thought process at the public theater.
Guest:And it wasn't specifically about race.
Guest:It was very much so invite people into this building who can work and play.
Guest:So it's.
Guest:So that sort of training, and that's what I consider, and it's very much a legacy of Joe Papp, but it's very much a legacy of my family, is that once you're in the room, you have a responsibility to create as many opportunities for as many people as you possibly can.
Guest:And then the community, the gay community and the black community, you know, is moving through you to some degree.
Guest:Yes, yes, exactly.
Guest:Or just, and I just even consider it, it's like, you know, when I was at the public, I would go, oh, they're not going to, I don't know if another theater is going to hire them to do a play.
Guest:I have to do their play.
Guest:You know what I mean?
Guest:Because I was, I was protected and I was, and very early on,
Guest:You know, I've, you know, I've very, I've had this, you know, I've struggled, but I've, you know, I got out of college and I struggled for 10 years, but then Color Museum was at the Public Theater in 1986.
Guest:And six years later, I was running the place.
Guest:And then my first show was on Broadway was Jelly's Last Jam.
Guest:And I went, that was hard.
Guest:It's going to take a lot of time.
Guest:And then the next year I was back with Angels in America.
Guest:And then the middle of Angels in America, I got off the chance to run the Public Theater.
Guest:And so I've had...
Guest:this sort of gloriously wonderful career.
Guest:There have been sad moments and all this other sort of stuff.
Guest:But I've felt so incredibly blessed.
Guest:So I feel this exaggerated sense of responsibility because not as some plain penance for my success, but that's just what you do.
Guest:And that's what was done for me very early on.
Guest:And
Guest:And I went to this school where it was like it was Negro History Week instead of month.
Guest:And it was a black man invented the traffic light.
Guest:There was literally, it was like this, it was borderline indoctrination.
Guest:Go forth with armor.
Guest:Go forth with confidence.
Guest:Go forth knowing that you are smart and special so that therefore when you come into contact with resistance, know it's about the person.
Guest:who is doing the resistance towards you.
Guest:It's not about anything intrinsic in you.
Guest:That was put in your head.
Guest:Very, very, very early on.
Guest:And the thing which was very interesting, then I then went to a public, predominantly white high school.
Guest:I stuttered really intensely when I was little.
Guest:So they decided I was stupid and spoke to my mother about putting me in remedial classes.
Guest:And she went, you're crazy.
Guest:That won't be happening.
Guest:I didn't know any of this, but I could tell because I was so spoiled as a child.
Guest:I could tell when I was being dismissed.
Guest:So in my mind, I went, oh, no, no, no, no.
Guest:This won't be.
Guest:And by the time, you know, I turned into a Vita Peron.
Guest:So by the time I left my high school, you know, I was, you know, I was an editor.
Guest:I was editor of the newspaper.
Guest:I was a drama.
Guest:I was the drum major.
Guest:I was shit.
Guest:I was no good at, but I just went out just to conquer.
Guest:So, you know, and so, but that sense of confidence, but in every single step of the way, it was interestingly enough, it was theater that gave me my power.
Guest:My mother went away to get her doctorate at my university, and she took me along, and I was always obsessed with theater, and I joined a theater group, and that gave me the confidence to go back
Guest:to begin to become, oh, the funny person at my high school.
Guest:And then just before that time, she came to NYU to do some advanced degree work, and she brought me along.
Guest:And that's when I saw New York theater.
Guest:So every single step of the way, interesting theater to me
Guest:wasn't just something that was enjoyable.
Guest:Theater was giving me my extra sense of my own power, my extra sense of confidence in how to go into the world.
Guest:And I remember this moment very specifically.
Guest:I was probably like about 10 or 11.
Guest:The principal at my school, we were invited to, for some cultural exchange, PTA thing, for a predominantly white school in Frankfurt.
Guest:And we sang this song, and this song, I don't remember any of the lyrics, these truths we are declaring that all men are the same, that liberty is a torch burning with a steady flame.
Guest:And our principal told us that when we came to the line, that liberty is a torch burning with a steady flame.
Guest:If we sing it,
Guest:with ferocity and intensity, all the racism in the room will fall away.
Guest:And so I don't remember the next line, the song goes on for about four or five more lines.
Guest:I don't remember because I just remember screaming that liberty is a torch burning with a steady flame.
Guest:But I consider it the most astonishing thing because someone told me if I committed to the language, I could change the world.
Guest:That didn't happen, but I believed it.
Guest:And so to this very day, I believe it.
Guest:So to this very day, when I go into a rehearsal room with actors, I pass on the power of committing to the language, committing to the words to them.
Guest:And it informs how I do what I do.
Marc:Beautiful.
Marc:Thank you for talking.
Marc:Thank you very much.
Guest:Okay.
Marc:If you can, I highly recommend seeing Shuffle Along.
Marc:It's playing on Broadway at the Music Box Theater.
Marc:I really want to thank George for talking to me.
Marc:Go to WTFPod.com for all your WTFPod needs.
Marc:You can check my tour dates coming up in July.
Marc:I'll be going to Spokane and Salt Lake City and Bloomington, Indiana and Phoenix.
Marc:Phoenix and Albuquerque.
Marc:I'm going to do one night in.
Marc:I'm going to Rochester.
Marc:Go to wtfpod.com slash tour to check my dates.
Marc:All right?
Marc:Okay.
Marc:We good?
Marc:All right.
Marc:Play guitar?
Marc:Sure.
Marc:Boomer Lives!