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[0:01] Lauren Van Hemert: Welcome to Beltline to Broadway!

[0:37] Lauren Van Hemert: Welcome to the Beltline to Broadway podcast. I'm Lauren Van Hemert, your host, and on this episode, I am chatting with two playwrights from opposite corners of the world, both of whom I would consider social justice warriors.

[0:55] Lauren Van Hemert: The first playwright I'm chatting with is david blakely, whose play Enemy of the People made its regional premiere on the East Coast earlier this month. Enemy of the People is inspired by Henrik Ibsen's play of the same name about a whistleblower in Norway who exposes the dangers of a town's local hot springs. In Blakely's adaptation, the main character is an investigative journalist who makes a seismic discovery that threatens an Oklahoma town. Blakely tells me that much like Ibsen, he's a realist, and that is where our conversation begins.

[1:40] Lauren Van Hemert: So many of your plays fall into this maybe documentary style theater, or some of your plays do, or make a commentary about social issues, whether it's homelessness or race relations. Do you consider yourself a social justice warrior?

[2:01] david blakely: I think that that's one of the things that the theater is intended to do is to point out the problems that we have in society, celebrate the good points. There's nothing better, I think, than having multiple points of view. And so I celebrate the idea of diversity in voices and in backgrounds and cultures and things like that. So yeah, I think that there are stories out there that are important, and sometimes they're true and also important at the same time. I use the word truth in what I should have used factual or historical, because all writing, if it's really good writing, comes from some sort of truth, right? And it can be something as simple as how important love is to people, how the world works better when people get along than when they don't get along.

And these you can dramatize in lots of different ways and tell many different stories, heartbreaking stories and heartwarming stories. But I do think that there's—I don't think that it's more legitimate to say this is based on a true story, but we are in a society now in which, gosh, every time you watch a movie or turn on a television, I think that they're saying based on a true story, and somehow that means something to us that whatever we're watching, whether it's you know horrifying because we're watching tigers being raised in Oklahoma by a weirdo, a nice weirdo, but crazy, crazy, crazy story, or a woman who owns vegan restaurants who is convinced by her husband that they are supernatural beings.

How do we live in a world that has all these odd things? And then how do we make sense of it? And sometimes we make sense of it by making up stories that will help us, and sometimes we just have to say, this is a crazy world we live in. Here's an example of it.

[4:25] Lauren Van Hemert: Well, and is that a playwright's job? Now, I sometimes ask my students when they come to my theater appreciation class, and I say that one of the purposes of theater is to illuminate something that we wouldn't normally be able to see because we're right in the middle of it. And my example that I give them is I ask them to raise their hand. Who knows a couple that you know for a rock solid fact should not be together? They're in a relationship that is really bad, and about half the class, three quarters of the class, they all we all know somebody. I don't know why they're together. And I said, and if you didn't raise your hand, it might be because you're in one of those and you don't know it, right?

But seeing it from the outside, we're able to sort of see it. And that I think is one of the things that contemporary playwrights and contemporary theater can do is that we're in the middle of it. How do we see it from the outside, unless we'd sort of take that step back and do the analysis and try to make sense of it? And who knows? It could make perfect sense looking at it from the inside.

[5:38] david blakely: Yeah, but it's safer to look at it from the outside.

[5:42] Lauren Van Hemert: It is, it is. And when it gets a little too close, it still appears to be from that you're looking at it from the outside. My favorite thing is when I have friends who write plays, and they write plays about very particular people in their lives, right? I base this character on Johnny, and Johnny has problems, and Johnny goes and sees the play and sees Danny, the character that's based on Johnny and goes, "That Danny's crazy. I would never want to be him." Whoo! What a crazy guy.

[6:24] david blakely: Oh, I love that. Some of your work has dove into the issue of racism. How does Enemy of the People speak to suppression of people, suppression of information, suppression of facts?

[6:44] david blakely: Ibsen's play, and I can let's enter this conversation about my adaptation through his play, is about a scientist who's discovered something is wrong with the drinking water in a town that has two main sources of main industries. One is a tannery, and the other are health spas. And the tannery is contaminating the groundwater so that the health spas are not going to be healthy. I don't live there anymore, but I used to live in Claremore, where I still work, and Claremore still has the bathhouses and the bathtubs from the radium bands that they had in the 1930s. And I came this close to making it about the radium bathhouses, you know, because it's just like, hey, if somebody says, "Hey, guess what?

You feel all tingly, not because you're feeling better. You're feeling tingly for a different reason." And I really like that idea that you can't do something about it without starting over from scratch. You have to close everything down and do something drastic in order to make it work. And people just aren't willing to do that. And so what I did instead of doing that, I dealt with some of the things that were happening here in Oklahoma as touchstones. And I particularly, I don't know if you know anything at all about it. It takes place on the weekend before the presidential election of 2016. That's when it takes place. And events that happen in the play, big events that happen in the play, actually happened in Oklahoma the weekend before the presidential election.

I'll leave it at that. And I thought, now that's interesting. The nexus between environment and politics is very, very interesting. And how can I—because that's what this—that's what Ibsen's play is about. And so I could do something with that.

[9:08] Lauren Van Hemert: What was the reception like there?

[9:11] david blakely: Well, it's the reason I changed the end of the play. Tulsa has been billed the oil capital of the world. One out of every five Oklahomans make their living in the petroleum industry, whether it is petroleum or some sort of byproduct or support system or whatever it is, one out of five. So if you're gonna take pot shots at the petroleum industry, people aren't gonna like you. They're not gonna like it. But I don't just make pot shots at them, I make pot shots at everybody. I think that it's important that if you get a half-baked idea and you decide to go full throttle with a half-baked idea, your result may not be exactly what you think it's going to be. But it did get a good—I mean, there were a lot of people. In fact, they decided that at the end of the year that they said here's the best artistic things that are happening in Tulsa, and the play was one of them.

[10:17] Lauren Van Hemert: There's another aspect of the play that you've been exploring here, which is the representation of a non-binary character on stage.

[10:29] david blakely: Yes. I actually wrote it for a non-binary friend of mine, a non-binary actor, to give them something. So talk about the development of that character.

[10:41] david blakely: So the actor that I had intended to be to play the part, the non-binary part, did not get—that was cast in the play, but not cast in the play as the non-binary role, and we actually have a non-binary character actor in the role in the Justice Theater Project, and so my friend didn't see that character from the inside and see how the other characters reacted to it—to them. But Nat, who's playing Billy, did. And Bill and Nat said, there are no allies in this play. And I get it, I know. I'm in my mind, maybe yes, but there wasn't anything specific in the play. And so thank you to Nat who brought that to my attention. Sometimes you get—I get caught up in writing the play, and what I love about actors is that they get caught up in playing the character.

[11:54] david blakely: My directing professor, Charlie Suggs, went to Yale University a long, long, long time ago. And one of his classmates was cast in a Broadway play, a brand new Broadway play called Streetcar Named Desire. He played the doctor, and Charlie and his wife Casey said, "Well, we're excited, we're gonna see it. What's it about?" He goes, "Well, I can't really tell you, but I'll tell you when it comes in." And so he goes, "I have an important role in it." And go and see Streetcar Named Desire on Broadway, and their friend isn't in the first act, and it's getting to the end of the play, and he isn't there. He finally comes in in the last three minutes of the play, and the play's over. And Charlie goes, "What?

What's going on? You said that you were playing an important part." He goes, "I did. I am the person who comes in and saves a family from a crazy woman." And he goes, "I don't think that's what the play's about." But in the actor's mind, that's what the world of the play is, right? I'm a doctor, I see a crazy woman, I'm gonna take it away so the family can heal. When in fact, the only thing that he is literally is a stranger because the famous line, "I've always relied on the kindness of strangers" is sent to the doctor at the end of the play. So that's what I love about actors, and I tell them when I direct, I said, I'm looking at the play and how the play works on the audience. You will know more about the character than I do because that's all—that's your world, that's where you see the world is from that. And so God bless the actors and God bless Nat for saying, speaking up and saying, "What about this?"

[14:06] david blakely: And I think that's great. I think it's absolutely great. Theater folks always have to justify why they're doing theater. Why is theater important? Oh, otherwise theater important? And we can talk about its job in the humanities and making the world more play. But I have two things. One of them is that if all we do is go to work and try to get bread on our table, that is a dull life. Every once in a while we should have roses. And sometimes a beauty is not beautiful, it's not roses. Um, and roses are thorny anyway, but um, but the other thing, uh, Pepperdine University study has said that people who engage in theater, participate in a theatrical production are twice as likely to speak out against uh, when they see an injustice happen, and so I am so thankful that uh, Matt said something.

Uh, I think that that's one of the things that theater is supposed to do is give you the courage to say this is not what the world should be. Stop that. So and in this, and if we follow this story to its full conclusion, I am the bad guy in that. I'm the one who wrote the play, then that said, hey, what about this? Yeah, yeah, I made a mistake. I admit, I made a mistake. How important now will it be going forward to for you to encourage companies producing this play to cast a non-binary character or non-binary actor in this role?

[16:12] david blakely: Well, the theater business is changing. And I think one of the things that's happened during the time in which we were not allowed to have performances because of the pandemic, that there was a great deal of figuring out what we have done wrong and how we can do it better. There's still a complete huge deficit in all sorts of areas from women playwrights don't get produced as much as male playwrights. And um, I hope that women playwrights do. I hope that I'm still one of the male playwrights that get produced, but I don't have to be that way. It doesn't matter to me. I think that it's much more important that we move forward than I and I play some sort of tiny role in that and saying, no, don't do my play, do their play.

Um, that we know that there's an underrepresentation. There's a huge story about, uh, do you know Katori Hall's beautiful play called The Mountain Top? Yes, it has two characters, two, two characters, and somebody produced that play. One of the characters is Martin Luther King Jr., and they cast a white man in it. Yeah, wait, wait. You said, oh, here's a great play that we can do. We probably have the cast to do that, you know, the people, you know, the gene pool to cast from. And I cast a white man as Martin Luther King Jr. We have a long way to go.

[17:55] david blakely: What do you hope people, audiences coming to see this play, and there's a lot of talkbacks and things happening around the play? But what do you hope the takeaway will be from folks seeing Enemy of the People? My view of what I'm supposed to write has changed a little bit. Um, I'm interested in ideas, and I think it's important that we get people to start thinking about things where they don't normally think about. But you're not gonna get them to think about things that they don't want to think about until you get them in the mood to think about those things, and so it is a lot easier to reach people through emotional responses than saying, Isn't it terrible that you know people treat people badly?

When you see someone treated badly that you don't want to have treated badly, you say to yourself, they shouldn't be treated badly because you feel it more than you think it. And so um, my hope is that people will laugh. Uh, the laughing is often disarming. It's also, uh, every joke, every joke has a sting. Some sort of sting. And my hope is that they'll laugh at the jokes in which they are not the sting, but I hope once they get used to that, they also laugh at the jokes in which they are the sting because they're emotionally invested in those people who are telling those jokes. I want them to come out feeling about the play. That doesn't necessarily mean they have to feel good or bad or anything.

I want them to feel something. I want them to have laughed, and I want them to um, to think. And I have to say, a joke has that emotional impact of laughter, but you don't get a joke unless you think about it, unless you engage your brain.

[20:16] Lauren Van Hemert: I'll put ticket information in the episode notes. Another playwright who appears to be having a bit of a moment is Nassim Soleimanpour. His play White Rabbit, Red Rabbit was produced by over 120 companies to commemorate the one-year anniversary of the pandemic shutdown. White Rabbit, Red Rabbit reimagines the way theater is made, stripping away rehearsals, direction, and design, leaving the actor to cold read the script for the first time in front of an audience. A master of form, Soleimanpour tells me that his cultural heritage and upbringing had a tremendous influence on his writing. And that is where our conversation begins.

[21:11] Nassim Soleimanpour: So there is for sure, because my dad is a novelist, writing was a thing. And then, yes, everyone around us, because of his situation, I had like all these famous, you know, Iranian writers, poets hanging out. They were like my aunties and uncles. So each one of them, of course, had an effect on the way that I, that my mind was shaped. Um, the most important thing is that this could be a combination of the frank, um, passionate culture that we have in Iran. Um, and these smart, sophisticated, well-read people, that nothing was good enough. I think since very, you know, very young ages, uh, whatever. If I were to read something, no one would treat me like a kid, and they would not celebrate it, they would not clap hands for me.

They would be very picky, they would be treating me like I am like a 70-year-old writer who's been writing for, you know, his whole life, which was very hard at the time, but I think it mainly shaped me as a writer than the style of writing that I have. Being obsessed with form, of course, is there. I mean, I remember, um, especially an Iranian writer called Shahior Mandanipur, who lives in the States, I think, uh, right now, uh, was very close to my father and to us, and he was very form pushing. He was like, yeah, like a legend in Iranian literature. So I think he had a big effect.

[22:55] Lauren Van Hemert: Tell me about growing up in Iran.

[22:59] Nassim Soleimanpour: Growing up there I think was nice. That doesn't mean life in Iran doesn't have any problems. I mean, you know, like I was in a bubble where we financially were okay. Things were different. You did not, I don't mean you, I mean the Western countries did not put sanctions on us for like, you know, decades, so financially the situation was easier. But in the meantime, we're talking about, you know, a sword with two edges. So we had, uh, all these, you know, restrictions which is not normal. But hey, I mean, if I'm like 18 and you tell me I cannot drink, that is not the biggest, you know, problem I can have, uh, in my life. Of course, the more the older you get, the more sophisticated you are and then many other topics, um, are, um, you know, core values of your life is different.

When I was, uh, 16, my whole life was like give me a ball I want to play soccer or, you know, basketball. That was my whole life which was okay. Again, I must insist I don't want to sound naive. Um, it is not a perfect beautiful, I mean you are aware of the dark side. So I'm trying to talk about the white side so that we end up somewhere more, you know, gray. In 1999 there was this uprising of students and it really started the independent student movement.

[24:33] Lauren Van Hemert: Were you a part of that movement? And is that why you didn't want to be in the military?

[24:35] Nassim Soleimanpour: Uh, yes and no. I mean, yes, I was a student at the time. We were obsessed, you know, with everything. I mean, both when later, even like the Green Revolution happened, of course, you know. So you are there, you, yeah, you're part of the whole thing. It is impossible to say I was not part of it. I mean, I might have been, you know, more actively involved every now and then, but I don't think anyone can say I was not part of it because it would affect your life. It was like all the discussions, you know, everything. Um, no, it did not actually, uh, is not the reason that I, uh, refuse to do military service. That's a very, very common choice. It's very easy for me to make something trendy out of it to play the hero when I've always declared that this is not the case.

I'm not a hero, I'm just a humble writer. Many Iranian boys do it. I mean, you're 18. So just to give you the idea that you're 18, you have to go do military service for two years. If you're our student, you can postpone, get your MA, get your PhD, and then you have to always go back and do your military service. The only punishment if you don't do the military service is that you would not be granted your passports. And hey, on an Iranian passport, every time it takes me at least a dozen thousand dollars, very good, expensive lawyers, and around 11 months to come to the US. And I live a luxurious life. I'm like a writer who has been performed all around your country. So my brother cannot easily even visit me in Germany on Hazirani.

So why would he actually go for laboratory? So punishment is like, you know, I'm not getting my passport, and there is no value to my passport. Why would I want to get my passport? So many people decide to do this. And I was busy doing other stuff. So I just postponed, postponed till I got invalidated, and then yeah, I got my passport.

[26:51] Lauren Van Hemert: And because you couldn't get a passport, you couldn't leave the country. And that was during the time that you wrote White Rabbit, Red Rabbit, is my timeline correct?

[27:01] Nassim Soleimanpour: Yeah, you've done your research, yes. You weren't surprised that the play traveled around the world. So talk about how you structured that play. And I'm very interested in the trial and error process. Think about, I mean, the easiest way to discuss this is that think about a car machine. No, since I'm obsessed with machines. If there is a machine which has traveled all around the globe, would you have ever asked the designer of the machine that it happened? It cannot happen. I mean, such a thing needs blueprints. It took me eight years of writing, rewriting, testing, you know. So it was not a coincidence. And I understand it's part of like it could be all of us want this, you know, miracle story of success.

[27:55] Nassim Soleimanpour: When it comes to a Middle Eastern, this is also like I think I don't want to use a word that offends anyone, but just like, oh, this poor Iranian, he got lucky and this happened to him, which I think is not the case. I mean, I'm not very lucky. And it happened as well. I mean, it's like the last factor in success is luck, you know. Uh, Kahneman wrote this beautiful book. At this point, everyone knows this, thinking fast and slow, and he proves you shouldn't really take it personal. But yes, it was all designed inside the play. Uh I have always said since the very beginning that Rabbit has two lives. One we are actually seeing, we've been seeing. I mean, during the pandemic, over uh 24 hours, uh that we did 120 shows of White Rabbit to travel.

So it was designed to survive. My email address is there. So if you have at the time I didn't have an agent, so if you watched it somewhere and you wanted to put it on, you would have sent me an email, say like Nassim, I loved it. Do you can I put it on? So this is when I talk about design, you know. So you already considered that okay, how am I gonna sell this if I'm in Iran? And the second life of Rabbit, I feel I've always said is uh again part of the design, is that if when or when I die, I think it would become really would become a different piece because then it would be this person from another world who is manipulating us, is not around anymore.

[29:24] Lauren Van Hemert: Were you surprised at the success? Because so many people have done this play. You mentioned it was done during the pandemic over a period of 24 hours. So many American celebrities have done this play. Were you surprised that it took off as relatively quickly as it did?

[29:42] Nassim Soleimanpour: Again, I would say yes and no. No, because as we discussed, I was expecting it to travel. I mean, you know, a lot and would survive. I mean, I always said, like it was in a it was a people say like it was a message in the bottle, and I say, like, no, it was like millions of messages in millions of bottles. But certain people, of course, when they picked it up to perform, it was confusing for me. I mean, I thought in my head uh I was going against uh mainstream. You know, I was just like this is a non-commercial approach to theater. Uh and at some point it started turning uh into a more commercial, you know, but when you when celebrities came in to perform. And I had like I had like a moment of, oh, do I like it or don't I like it?

Um encountered a phenomenon that I was not aware of, you know. So I realized that when you do a cold read, actually, like when normally we do plays, I write plays as well, like more conventional plays. I mean, still not that conventional, but not cold reads. Um you it's just like a writer has time, or a team of writers, they have time to design, you know, a character to their uh dialogues, and and then the actor comes in, they have time, the director, makeup artist, the dress, you know, light, everything. So we create this superhuman, which it looks like my one of my uncles, since we spoke about them, or one of my aunties, but it is like it has a plus next to them. And that I assume is part of the reason that many celebrities feel separated from the society, they might even go mad, you know, drink more and all those stuff, because they are something else.

So when you get a celebrity to come and perform in a cold read, they totally become unarmed, they don't know what they're doing. Sometimes light does not help them, there's no directing, there's no rehearsal. So actually, the machine starts doing something else, and they somehow break them back into what they are, and it is sometimes very painful, but in the meantime, very beautiful, and that was a phenomenon that I was not aware of when I was designing the machine. So basically, what I'm trying to say is that I have designed a machine for a purpose, and then the input has changed, and and still the output was was okay, but there was this byproduct, which I which I call bycatch, like if we're fishing, which I was not aware of, and then I spend more time studying this byproduct on my other works.

[32:18] Lauren Van Hemert: Yeah, I feel like of the specificity of the structure, it becomes very universal. I also love the idea that in your work, the audience becomes a collaborator almost. You don't let your audience off the hook, they can't just sit there and watch these plays. So talk to me about engaging the audience and creating an active audience versus a passive theatrical audience.

[32:52] Nassim Soleimanpour: The way I look at theater, to be honest, is that I never felt like I'm trapped in theater. I never felt like you know, I cannot try to write for Netflix. And I'm not saying I will not do this, but what is the difference between cinema and theater? What is it? What is the core you know difference there? Is this hive mind of audience? Oh, the the best example that I'll always talk, uh discuss in in workshops. I say if I speak Farsi, so you don't speak Farsi, probably, I assume. Maybe some of you in your audience they do. But let's say, let's imagine it's only me who speaks Farsi, no, and you don't speak Farsi. And I speak English, some English, as you notice, not perfect English. Um, if I am like sitting on stage and I have 200 audience members in the auditorium, and I teach each of them one word in Farsi.

That could be like I would speak it, practice it with them, or like I would give each of them one piece of paper, and then uh immediately I have a room in which 200 British people, American people, each they can speak, each of them can speak one or two words in Farsi. So now I have a basis. So if I start speaking in Farsi, and we have this rule established that, like as soon as you hear your word, you shout the English equivalent, you work as a hive mind, you become like a live Google translate. So I can communicate with you in a universe which is not Netflix, which is something else. So what I what I always uh concentrate on is a combination of this mechanism and having fun, because to me, this is a party, you know.

So you I you you and I don't go to a party and I immediately say, like, what do you think about you know the politics in the US? That is not that is you need an icebreaker, you know. You just chat, you laugh, nice classes, you know, and then yes, later, maybe after the second drink, it even becomes deep and emotional. We laugh and we cry.

[35:00] Lauren Van Hemert: Do you feel like actively engaging the audience in this way? Does that build empathy?

[35:07] Nassim Soleimanpour: It does. I mean, cold read builds empathy. That is a key. It's just like you have this intrepid performer who volunteered to just stand there and take the, I wouldn't say bullets, the tomatoes, you know. So they are there historically, they say meada because you know, pardon me because it was thrown at them on stage. So now they are ready and they are standing there, and then they are like, okay, I want to do it, and I am fragile, and it becomes comic. We all laugh, but we we root for them. So that I think, yes, you're right. Um secondly, I think people keep asking me, why do you do this? And I keep thinking, why not? Why don't you do this? How can you ignore, you know, look with brag it's Broadway because it's plus thousand or whatever?

How can you ignore 1,000 people, 1,000 cell phones in their pockets? I mean, William Shakespeare would have never done this. We keep doing, we keep producing Shakespeare in a way that he would have never done produced if he was alive in 2022. He would be so disappointed to see what we're doing. I cannot buy into it.

[36:28] Lauren Van Hemert: The production company doing the play now locally in North Carolina, they uh they almost think of this as a protest play. Do you think of your work as protest plays?

[36:40] Nassim Soleimanpour: I don't know what protest plays are. I mean, I I can I can try to imagine what they want to say. Uh I think protest uh coming from Iran, speaking of the history, is it's not one thing, it can be like a way to start a dialogue, or it can be full of blood. I would consider myself a reformist. I want reform in my own way, in my own corner of you know literature. But I don't want to shed blood. I mean, protests sometimes in my head can end up. I mean, come on, you had the capital in the US, you know what I'm talking about.

[37:22] Lauren Van Hemert: Yeah. Do you think do you feel that theater has a role in moving the needle, affecting some social change?

[37:32] Nassim Soleimanpour: I think it naturally does. I think is uh I think theater is full stop. You know, we try to go, theater is this and that, or does this and that, and I understand scholars want to do it. Like a tree does not grow so that it, you know, it gives us some shadow or some fruits. The theater is so theater, the the what is happening between you and I now is naturally theatrical, and then someone else is listening to it, we don't see them. They cannot, you know, come and interrupt a discussion because of the tradition of theater, because I think the key uh to all these these answers in my head is that I think historically you and I were like sitting somewhere in a cave, bored, scared, starving. And then we started being, you know, looking at each other, communicating in a way.

So this is where to me, theater starts. And then the whole you know, history of theater that we know till a turning point where actually it became like staged. So now you and I are looking at something else, and they are looking at us, but you and I are not looking at us any each other anymore. Then radio can comes in. Don't even look at this other person at the end of the line. Like if this is an audio and you don't know how I look now. So this is a phenomenon in my head. We skip, you know, we're like, yeah, yeah, we agreed. Let's go do this. I'm doing an audio play now for Audible. But in my head, it's just like, what happened? Then of course, TV comes in. So in audio, when we have radio, you and I still can look at each other, but listen to this absent person.

When TV comes in, you and I share this person. Like we look at this person who is not present, it's different from theater. And when smartphones and notebooks come in, this is where I get really confused. So now, like I'm looking at my own screen, laughing while you're looking at your screen, you know. So I think somewhere we got lost, to be honest. I mean, as long as as far as notebooks, I was okay. Smartphones, I think, I mean, doesn't really work for me. I have one, I have to have one, I have to, yeah. But I think some, yeah, we lost some important stuff at some point.

[39:57] Lauren Van Hemert: What do you hope people will take away from seeing your work from being, I feel like from being challenged in this way, both the art, both the artist and the audience?

[40:11] Nassim Soleimanpour: I mean, my biggest hope is that it is very easy to be very avant-garde and very entertaining, because I think this is another confusion. This is what the confusion that happened in the 70s. People made big names out of it, and good for them. They deserved it. It was a good movement, you know, that if if you don't understand me, pardon me, but you are stupid because I'm intellectual. And I I don't buy into it anymore. I think you can be very avant-garde. You can create a mechanism where it becomes cheaper for the producer to produce a show. And then they can sell a lot of tickets so their revenue would go higher, and this business can exist. And still the show can be very avant-garde. It's not just like you know, like certain type of musicals or like entertainment that can make money.

And I I hope we've we've proved it with these shows. I think there are other ways to do that. So Lemon Poor has been touring the United States with his new play, Nassim, White Rabbit Red Rabbit, is being produced by other only Windows and Raleigh. I'll put additional information in the episode notes.

[41:23] Lauren Van Hemert: If you like what you've heard today, please consider subscribing to this podcast. Follow us on social media on Facebook or Instagram at Beltline to Broadway or Twitter at Beltline to Be Way, or visit us online at www.beltline to broadway.org. Until next time, I'll see you at the theater.