This transcript was automatically generated and might contain errors.

[0:05] Jan Svendsen: Welcome to the Broadway Gives Back Podcast.

[0:07] Jan Svendsen: I'm your host, Jan Svendsen.

[0:10] Jan Svendsen: This podcast spotlights Broadway actors, shows, and organizations in their pursuit of social impact and philanthropy.

[0:17] Jan Svendsen: Join us as some of the brightest lights on Broadway share their stories about their favorite charities and how they got involved and the people on the causes who benefited from these philanthropic efforts.

[0:33] Jan Svendsen: You know her from her memorable roles on Breaking Bad, The Boys, and of course Susan, the lesbian lover to Ross's ex-wife on Friends.

[0:42] Jan Svendsen: For nearly 30 years, Jessica Hecht has been a familiar and welcome presence on film, television, and on stage.

[0:49] Jan Svendsen: Her most recent roles include USA Network's The Sinner and the new Netflix show Special.

[0:56] Jan Svendsen: And on Broadway, we've loved her in The Assembled Parties, and of course, as Golda in Fiddler on the Roof, and so much more.

[1:02] Jan Svendsen: She also lends her voice and talent raising money for a number of important causes, including the amazing and impactful program supporting refugees called the Campfire Project.

[1:12] Jan Svendsen: I'm so thrilled to have her here today. Jess, my dear friend, welcome to the Broadway Gives Back Podcast.

[1:18] Jessica Hecht: Oh, thank you. I'm so thrilled to see you and be with you.

[1:22] Jessica Hecht: It's been a while, and it's so good to see you too.

[1:24] Jessica Hecht: I feel like we need to have a um a quick um sort of get to know you again um moment.

[1:30] Jessica Hecht: So I'd love to play a little game and do a little rapid fire QA with you if you're willing to be so willing.

[1:37] Jessica Hecht: Okay, let's do this.

[1:38] Jan Svendsen: What's your guilty pleasure?

[1:40] Jessica Hecht: Oh, my guilty pleasure is um uh popcorn um pedicures.

[1:49] Jessica Hecht: And um I would say, oh, I'm so nerdy. Popcorn pedicures, and I guess maybe I would say Jen.

[2:00] Jessica Hecht: I'm really stumped at what I do that makes me guilty.

[2:04] Jessica Hecht: There must be some huge thing that's like I'm omitting.

[2:07] Jessica Hecht: Um what are your guilty pleasures? You'll spark them in me.

[2:09] Jan Svendsen: Oh my gosh. Chocolate, chocolate and chocolate.

[2:16] Jessica Hecht: Oh, oh, it's like that.

[2:18] Jan Svendsen: My God.

[2:20] Jessica Hecht: I love, okay, these are my true guilty pleasures. We can mix the others.

[2:24] Jessica Hecht: Um black licorice, dark chocolate covered caramels, and definitely just I'm not joking, like pounds of popcorn, you know, like a huge tub of popcorn and pedicures, which I stopped getting really, but I used to really love them.

[2:43] Jan Svendsen: Okay, I think we should go get a Manny Petty together when I love that.

[2:46] Jessica Hecht: Let's do it.

[2:48] Jan Svendsen: And what job do you think you would be terrible at?

[2:53] Jessica Hecht: Oh gosh, I would be uh terrible at any job that required serious executive functioning.

[3:01] Jessica Hecht: I would be terrible as an office manager, um secretary, uh somebody that entered data into an insurance company's, you know, computer.

[3:15] Jan Svendsen: Thank God we know what you're good at.

[3:17] Jan Svendsen: Um you had to pick three adjectives to describe yourself quickly. What three adjectives would you pick?

[3:24] Jessica Hecht: Um anxious, um thoughtful, and um uh girly.

[3:34] Jan Svendsen: Girly, hmm, okay. I definitely see the thoughtful side.

[3:39] Jan Svendsen: Um speaking of which, what do you most give a damn about?

[3:44] Jessica Hecht: Children.

[3:45] Jan Svendsen: Okay. What dream have you yet to achieve?

[3:49] Jessica Hecht: True self-possession in the workplace.

[3:55] Jessica Hecht: Truly feeling like I can say what I want about what we're doing and what I need.

[4:03] Jan Svendsen: What's one thing you say you're gonna do but you know you never will do?

[4:08] Jessica Hecht: Call the insurance company to take care of all of these.

[4:14] Jan Svendsen: So my husband is listening. Did you call the insurance company?

[4:19] Jessica Hecht: What I say I'll do, but I will never do. Um it's is something physically dangerous.

[4:26] Jessica Hecht: I often say that I'll do something that I think could be dangerous, you know, some sort of climb or some sort of experience, and I'm very I play it sort of safe.

[4:36] Jan Svendsen: Yeah, yeah. What are you most grateful for today?

[4:41] Jessica Hecht: My health and my family's health.

[4:46] Jan Svendsen: And what are you most proud of in your life?

[4:49] Jessica Hecht: My my son and my daughter, without a doubt.

[4:52] Jan Svendsen: Yeah.

[4:53] Jessica Hecht: And my mom. I think my mom is kind of amazing person.

[4:57] Jan Svendsen: Yeah.

[4:59] Jan Svendsen: You do so many acts of kindness, but what's the last random act of kindness you performed?

[5:04] Jessica Hecht: Uh well, I guess in the last hour I've made several calls to find out whose debit card I found in the street, but I don't know if that was a random act of kindness.

[5:14] Jessica Hecht: Um I think um yeah, I'm having um a lot of people stay in my home who are who are who are without homes because of COVID situations, I guess, and some someone just arrived today.

[5:28] Jessica Hecht: So I guess my house is your house.

[5:32] Jan Svendsen: You're such a kind person. So it's beautiful.

[5:35] Jan Svendsen: No, you really are. And you know, that's actually a perfect segue because I want to talk about the um incredible act of kindness that you have performed in founding um the Campfire Project, um, which you and I have talked about a lot over the years.

[5:49] Jan Svendsen: And I just wish you'd tell all the listeners about how the Campfire Project came to be and um what it's about and uh any information about what you do and why you do it.

[6:00] Jessica Hecht: Yeah. So it's such an interesting um, it's it's I'm so grateful to be on this because it it's made me think a little bit again back to my original impulse with that project.

[6:11] Jessica Hecht: And my one of the things I'm very proud of with my children is that they're um they're they're incredibly perceptive about me in many ways, about people as well.

[6:22] Jessica Hecht: And when I was in the midst of developing the Campfire Project, which I will describe in a minute, my daughter in a moment of sort of teen um fiction, and I was taking quite a lot of time focusing on this project, said, um, I think you'd get more sleep if you weren't obsessed with this project, which is just happening because you feel so bad about all these children.

[6:45] Jessica Hecht: Isn't it aren't you just doing it to make yourself feel better? And I and my daughter does a lot of things to make other people feel better, but she did express something true about why people do things sometimes.

[7:00] Jessica Hecht: And um, and I do think that w at the height of the Syrian refugee crisis, I was doing Fiddler on the Roof, and we were doing a lot of research, and I was questioning what theater actually can do to make people feel um connected to really important stories and maybe feel motivated to look beyond their lives and to you know somehow be um enlivened by these stories.

[7:28] Jessica Hecht: And that came at the time when that little boy had perished crossing um from Syria to Greece or from Turkey to Greece, actually, I think in his body washed up on shore, and I was really um obsessed with that image, and yes, I felt terrible and started to think about the way you know I could make myself feel better, maybe by doing something.

[7:51] Jessica Hecht: And I was looking at Fiddler on the Roof as a story of refugees and whether or not in reality that that play makes people feel heard and seen, but what what could we possibly what could theater possibly do um to to create action?

[8:09] Jessica Hecht: So we started by during that time, I started researching backstage a lot of stories of small um NGOs, small non-government organizations that were providing help to people crossing.

[8:23] Jessica Hecht: And I'll tell you something. I also I also have to say, and I don't know if any of the other people on the show have expressed this, that it came at a period when I wasn't feeling great about my creative work.

[8:36] Jessica Hecht: I felt like stuck, and I felt like, oh, I'm in this show, which is a huge success. But a lot of times we're in something that's successful, but we don't actually feel like we're we've figured something, we're doing something special ourselves.

[8:51] Jessica Hecht: We feel that we're part of a big machine that creates a beautiful show, but are you actually um you yourself functioning at a very high level? And I thought, at least while I'm here, let me see if I can make my brain work when I'm backstage.

[9:08] Jessica Hecht: So I was focusing on looking at these NGOs, and we had every week a bake sale that I had. My dresser and I were very into baking.

[9:18] Jessica Hecht: And uh we said, you know what, each week what we could do is bake goodies, and Bess Glorioso, the wonderful stage manager, also baked.

[9:25] Jessica Hecht: And my dresser's name is Erin Roth. And the three of us would bake goodies and bring them around to the dressing rooms.

[9:31] Jessica Hecht: And we made like $35,000, I think. Each week we would um uh pick an organization, and in researching them, I saw how many people just said, Look, I know how to sail.

[9:47] Jessica Hecht: I'm gonna, I'm gonna charter a couple of boats to go into those waters and try to help collect people who are literally swimming from from shore to shore.

[9:57] Jessica Hecht: And I became fascinated. And toward the end of my whole experience of that show, I researched all those organizations, and a cousin of mine came to see it and told me the story of being um uh in an internment camp after the second world war.

[10:14] Jessica Hecht: And he said, We did plays by Sherla Melech in the camp. I know I did a play called The Gold Digger, which is very ironic as a Jewish play, but needless to say, he said, I love the theater was always in the camps, and I had no idea that people did plays in these camps, or probably even in concentration camps.

[10:34] Jessica Hecht: Obviously, music was played and all of that. And I started to hatch this plan to do a play with people in in a camp.

[10:42] Jessica Hecht: Like I just thought like I got, and just at that time I heard on NPR the story of the organization, the good um it's called Good Theater, the theater uh that um uh that the jungle, the play the jungle chronicled in Calais, where they went into the camp in Calais and did Hamlet over and over again, every night, the same production for the same people, and until the camp was torn down.

[11:07] Jessica Hecht: And I started obsessing about this, and I by that time was very fortunate to be doing a different play.

[11:13] Jessica Hecht: I was doing then The Price with the great activist and actor Mark Ruffalo.

[11:18] Jessica Hecht: And um I started to talk to him about his work, and I said, It's amazing what you did with the people at Standing Rock and how do you organize people?

[11:30] Jessica Hecht: And he said, Why? And I said, you know, I I have this idea, and he said, You've already organized the idea in your head. You just need now to contact a lawyer to get into the camp and to bring some people together.

[11:46] Jessica Hecht: And it was actually shockingly a pedestrian thing. I mean, look, I had hired many babysitters in my lifetime.

[11:54] Jessica Hecht: I had high, I had I had researched many things that I wanted to do for my own family. Now I just had to kind of shepherd a bunch of actors who love being shepherded or a bunch of artists to this camp.

[12:06] Jessica Hecht: And once we started on it, um, and I had the guidance of a wonderful Syrian actor named Laith Nakley, who I said someone put me in touch with him, and he then put me in touch with 10 people from the Middle East, actors who then wanted to go to these camps, and through in a lawyer that Mark Ruffalo connected me to, um this wonderful lawyer who runs an umbrella organization that helps a lot of um NGOs named a lawyer named Jay Halfhan.

[12:37] Jessica Hecht: Um, he said, Yeah, I know of a camp where somebody is desperately trying to bring in art and any wellness project. And we reached out to them and they said, Come see what we're doing, come see what the camp is like, and then tell me if you can if you can work with us. And so I took um Jenny Gerston, the superb producer, and uh Tom Viola from Broadway care. So this is how these things work. So Mark Ruffalo told me call my lawyer. I called his lawyer. Then I started to reach out to the Middle Eastern community, and I realized I don't know really how to produce. I called Jenny Gerston, who I think is a remarkable mind and remarkable producer. She said, 'Yeah, we're gonna do this, I'll help you.'

I told Tom Viola that I needed to raise money. What would he suggest? He said, you know, call um call call Mary Campbell, Mary, um my god, Mary Blank Campbell, Mary. Um, I have to look her. I can't believe I'm forgetting um uh uh Mary Mitchell Campbell. Mary Mitchell Campbell, thank you. Forgot that middle name, and she's such a formidable person. Um, and uh she she came, and the uh director Aaron Arbis, who's working Shakespeare, I always loved. She works, um, I mean, she's a Broadway director as well, but she had done all of this amazing work at um Theater for a New Audience, and she had worked in prisons. So all of these little pieces started coming together. So the four of us went to Greece for uh seven days and just went to the camp, and um and realized that the biggest thing we found there was despair and this boredom, boredom, and hopelessness.

The conditions were were bad, but they weren't like some of the camps where you you hear about flowing sewage or you just saw people living in small trailers, crammed in small trailers with nothing to do all day.

[14:36] Jan Svendsen: And um, I just want to interrupt you because I didn't realize as you told me, people live in those camps for years sometimes, right?

[14:44] Jessica Hecht: Yes, yeah. Years and years. The average time, Jan, is 15 years in camps now, considering how long it takes to get asylum. A family could live for 15 years in a refugee camp. I think that gives context to like your project too, because that idea of just boredom and hopelessness over that sustaining that period of time. Anyway, sorry, I didn't mean to interrupt, go on with your story.

[15:09] Jessica Hecht: No, I feel like I'm and if you have any other uh uh any other questions or or or remarks, please um, but I I think about COVID and how frustrated we were in our own homes. I mean, you can sort of now reflect on that. People and also people who are then shuttled into something um because of their resources, um uh far less dynamic than they were accustomed to living in. And and that so that's been whatever 16 months. Now you think about that for years and years and years. Um so we went there, and Mary Mitchell we found the key because of Mary Mitchell's gifts, that her ability to play music and the Pied Piper aspect of it became very palpable for us. Mary Mitchell also runs an organization in India that um that uh creates pieces, uh sort of musical theater pieces um with girls in India, with children in India, but I think primarily cur primarily girls.

So she really knew how to do this. And um that visit, we uh we were inspired and we were we asked people um about what the United States meant to them and what um what Shakespeare meant to them, and we we really understood then that the they these refugees wanted desperately to have um a sense of what their life was before they were there rekindled. And you're talking about people who were professionals and who were very well educated, and regardless of how well educated or or what their professional status was in the country they came from, they were people with very full lives um and customs that included the arts.

[17:04] Jessica Hecht: So we we came back home and we crafted this um this idea to do the Tempest in Arabic because it was the story of a sea voyage gone awry and um and we wanted to do it with with music and we wanted to do it in their language and we wanted to do it with movement, and we randomly, you know, it's funny, Jen, because you have so much time when you're creating these projects that you are going off of your sense of what theater is. I mean, you work in our, I mean, the idea of what a show is, you know. So we wrote music with, you know, our composer, and we brought um this incredible movement artist, this is a crepel choreographer from Fiddler on the Roof, the assistant choreographer from Fiddler on the Roof, came with us from London.

We had an international group, and um, and in the end, we had 20 people essentially come with us. We raised 125,000, and with that money, we went four times. And then the first time we went, we brought uh actually 20 people plus a uh a crew to document it because unless you document what you did, there's no going back, you can't return. Um, and we realized a lot of our understanding of what a show was um was bloated, like the idea of just moving as a group, just just having a routine where people created um the simplest movements and and created some music that seemed reflective of their culture and all of that, those were the and and um an ability to literally breathe in a space that wasn't the confines of their home. Because you're living in these tiny um cannons, they're containers, they're called containers, and that's what they are, they're shipping containers.

[19:00] Jessica Hecht: And so with this wonderful psychiatrist Kathy Radens, we um we did uh breathing routine and we uh we we came upon a lot of things. We realized that uh there were certain things that we thought would just be sort of little appetizers to the program. We we thought, oh, we'll do we'll do some drumming work or we'll do some. We had brought a remarkable clown, uh a a a guy that's uh named Orlando Pabatoy, who's a a tremendous clown, like in the European sense. And he's he walked on stilts and we thought it would be again like this Pied Piper. I can't tell you that was the most moving aspect for somebody who is literally on the ground because the world is oppressing them. The world says you can't live anywhere.

The idea of getting on a pair of stilts and walking through a refugee camp with children walking behind you. We know there's tremendous um prejudice still in in camps. There's a lot of which is a very interesting phenomenon but of course it exists everywhere in this feeling of I don't want to be the one on the bottom. And that was one of the only things that things that we found um allowed people to feel like they could rise up out of out of this kind of despair and oppression of what and there were African there were many refugees or residents from Africa from Somalia and from the Sudan and from Congo who had traditionally walked on stilts in their cultural you know rituals and they were the most brilliant stilt walkers and we taught everyone to walk on stilts and the drumming there were so many elements and in the end after 18 days we uh for the first our first time there, we did a production of the Tempest um uh in Arabic, translated by a remarkable actor that I found who actually was from Syria and was a very well-known actor in Syria.

He had done a popular television show. And so his name was is Adham Merked. He's back in Syria now, but he was a star to the people in the camp. And he wound up playing Prospero all around him. All of these uh all of these uh people in the camp played all the accompanying parts. And on a day when the camp was about to shut down because there was an act of violence that somebody was on the top of a container threatening a tremendous number of people, we were able to sort of um shepherd a large group of over 200 people to a little area and perform the Tempest after the the man had been um calmed. And it was uh it was incredible. We went back three other times and did smaller pieces with them that were based on either drumming, which is uh incre like a a real unifier, or um storytelling. I hope that wasn't too long an extra.

[22:11] Jan Svendsen: No, no, no. I I have so many more questions. And um, I I know when we first met and we had coffee at Le Pan Quotidian many years ago. Um but you know, so you basically you go there, did you have auditions? Like did people come and audition for the parts? And how did you did they did you sell tickets? How did you like did you operate it sort of like a regular theatrical experience in that way?

[22:35] Jessica Hecht: So interesting. Well, it was really based on interest, and then once we got everybody in there, commitment, you know, because um camps are not regulated by traditional um schedules, you know, people get up, most people in refugee camps get up very late because they don't sleep at when it's dark. It's a very common phenomenon that people just don't sleep at night because of many factors, you know, uh including fear of the dark and nightmares and all of this. So they sleep until the afternoon. So we would arrive at noon and try to see who was up and then try to see which people were consistently coming. Because that without that's this is a phenomenon that you think of in all institutions. Without something regulated, you literally can't quite remember what you were supposed, you know, it's very difficult.

So we would knock on the doors and we would try to get this group to return day after day. It was very difficult. So it was really by those who could um those who could commit and they were given, which is another facet of this uh this this work that we did that is ultimately gearing people toward their asylum interviews. So, you know, when you go to an asylum interview, you're asked what you can show for in your time in the camp. And the idea of actually having a certificate, like a certificate that you would get at staples, and you would that just says, you know, Adham Merked arrived every day promptly at you know, 12 o'clock, rehearsed and performed the role of Prospero in the Tempest at the Ritsona refugee camp, was something that a an asylum um auditor would look at and think of as a credible occupation of somebody's time, and it would add to their asylum papers.

[24:25] Jessica Hecht: Wow. And that, you know, I mean, uh, you know, these so that was very important to us to say every day, we were going to give you a certificate for your interview. We learned a lot from an incredible company called The Possibility Project, which does work, creates musicals with kids in started in New York, but now it's in several cities, uh, with kids who have been incarcerated or in foster care.

[24:53] Jessica Hecht: Um, and they talk to us quite a bit. Um, their creator, Paul, about um not making it um um audio uh talent based, but always making things merit-based, the merit of showing up, the merit of empathy, the merit of being able to listen, the merit of all of these things, these questions you asked me in this world should have merit. And so that's the way we started to base our choices on who would stay in the group. So you had this incredible group of um of people that were putting behind the scenes, you know, directors and choreographers and composers and producers, and then you had this group of people that were residents in the camp that were performing. And then so there's a can there's all these different connections, I guess, that are going on at this point between relationships that are developing, plus the relationship to the story of The Tempest, right?

As you said, you were very thoughtful about selecting that piece. And then I guess were there other connections in terms of people coming to see the show? They must have felt also this isn't something to do, number one, in a camp where there's nothing to do, but also something productive and a story that makes you feel.

[26:09] Yeah, you know, it's such an interesting question because in the end, that story, and we chose we wrote music. There was music, beautiful music um written for it, that sort of felt a little American folky, and um, I guess if you were to have to um think of like the music of once some music that you would just feel like oh this is my heart, and these um residents of the camp listen to the music, and there was no registry because the core of Middle Eastern music is completely different. There's no correlation between sort of American folk music and the rhythm of that and Middle Eastern music. So it was the drumming that got us connected to sort of an African beat, and then we rewrote the music.

And I'll get you know, I wish at when we're done, there's a link to the documentary, a short form documentary that we made that I'm gonna at least send to you that you can hear the music. You know, we'll do we'll put that on the episode page. We'll put the link on so people can while we're talking, they can go back and refer to that.

[27:21] Jan Svendsen: That's great. And I've never seen it, so I really want to see it.

[27:24] Jessica Hecht: Oh, I love that. And so um, and also the story of The Tempest, the sea voyage was something that um people didn't want to directly acknowledge. They acknowledged the uh the sort of the seeking of vengeance and letting that go. We talked a little bit about that, seeking vengeance against people who wronged us and letting that go. I mean, that's obviously a big theme in that play. So it's not always hit on the head the way you think, you know, you think and people and you're trained when you go into these camps, or you're told, because we were umbrellaed by an organization that was a remarkable organization called I Am You, like I am like you. And um, they talk to us about not pushing for people to tell their story head on, and that will come if they feel safe. Many people, a few people that we got very close to swam, which is extremely traumatic, the distance between Turkey and Greece in a state of panic, hysteria.

[28:30] Jan Svendsen: Yeah.

[28:31] Jessica Hecht: So there's many stories and many traumas that you can't. We're not we brought a psychiatrist with us, and um, yeah, I was gonna say you were dealing with psychology, you were dealing with cross-cultural communications, you were dealing with the differing value orientations, you were dealing with racism, um, you were dealing with trauma. There was so much bound into like all of the aspects of that were sort of up in addition to putting on a show, right?

[29:00] Jan Svendsen: Yeah, there were.

[29:02] Jessica Hecht: I mean, I have to say that I would imagine you would create something similar, like we create according to what I think the foundation of our own um our own person is about. And I come from a family of psychiatrists and um, and uh I have a sister who's a psychiatrist, my father's a psychiatrist, and my mother and my younger sister were therapists and suicidologists and so we all um that was that's my family business. So it was almost impossible for me not to include um uh somebody from that world. Um because I feel I can hear from my family how much the arts how how how much the arts actually influences your psyche and your breathing. And so that came very naturally. Um but we were also really schooled in an aspect of this work which is really difficult which is that you cannot create friendships or you cannot create um dynamics that um so you cannot create dynamics that go beyond the um sort of traditional volunteer resident relationship and that's very very difficult you cannot pick up children and embrace them when they're crying unless it's an emergency cannot give water to people if you don't give water to everybody all of these things these these it's a very prescribed way in which you have to deal with people which which was the most difficult for our team not I mean to this day I have people writing and saying I still haven't received asylum if there's any way you could get me a lawyer and that's um that would be a breach of what we yeah boundaries are hard.

[30:54] Jan Svendsen: You know for us we yeah um you know it's just so amazing to me because so many people will say they care and I'm sure that they do care about different causes. And they will you know they'll write a check or they'll you know donate their time to a benefit one night or something but you my friend you did it all like you you did everything and it's just so amazing and I know that we spoke briefly um or communicated briefly that you're thinking of doing this now on the Mexican border um to the refugee camps there.

[31:29] Jessica Hecht: So that plan was foiled because of COVID. What we did during COVID was to take some workshops with the Possibility Project on how to create something that um that works for people that have just crossed um I wanted to understand better how to work with people on our own borders who were in a more immediate state of trauma. And of course when we were there in Greece and it's very difficult to get there and it's very expensive and it's very complicated, we kept we started to talk about our own our own borders and what was going on. They started to say two years ago your president put children in cages and I thought so that was a big source of discussion about our about what had happened here and obviously look I I don't want to speak politically but the refugee crisis here is not in any way resolved and the trauma now of getting asylum when you have when you have to go to an asylum meeting immediately this will connect to what I wanted to want to do here when you you have maybe 15 minutes to plead your case or whatever and people are traumatized we are trying we will go to our own border the Juarez El Paso border in the next year to begin a project there that will have two psychiatrists this time and 10 um I call them theater artist facilitators to work on storytelling.

I want to get more anchored in what it is to do personal storytelling. The goal is to get you asylum or to get you into a place where you can organize your own history. I'm not expressing that I have the in any way the capability of doing that, but start to develop those tools. And even for the children to be able to.

[33:29] Jan Svendsen: So yes, we will we will go. We were supposed to go to El Paso and Juarez with the Hope Border Mission, which is like arguably the largest organization working in Juarez. But um, but at this moment they're not letting anyone uh go down there for any reason other than immediate physical um concerns, you know, to help uh people just literally to facilitate their physical well-being. And um so we will plan to go in the fall um with another organization that will umbrella us into um several shelters that are actually um that are actually housing families for longer periods of time.

[34:11] Jessica Hecht: I love that you do all this, but I also love that the program addresses so many of the needs of these people that are fleeing their countries. And you know, it's funny, not all of us are like in Broadway shows, and and but I mean here was this show that you were researching and and getting more in touch with the idea of refugees that led to this. But the idea of philanthropy um in general for you, um, how did you grow up like in your family they were all they were all psychiatrists and psychologists? Um, but did were they philanthropic, or how did you get into the social activism and philanthropy?

[34:48] Jessica Hecht: Yeah, I mean, I I feel embarrassed that I'm not um I I guess I was gonna say I feel embarrassed that I'm not um political in the way some people can be um politically articulate and effective in their campaigning for certain aspects of um uh you know our our freedoms as Americans. I mean, I feel like I I look outside of uh that because I don't I don't feel like I'm somebody who is innately political. I I feel like I'm innately interested in the human experience. And so um when I was growing up, my family was um, I just grew up in this family that basically was interested in community. I think that's what I would say my my parents were and my siblings were like in interested in community causes, in in um always doing like a summer carnival for some and giving the money to whatever cause was around, whether it was a shelter or whether it was muscular dystrophy, whether we just operated in that way.

And uh, and then when I was coming out of college, I did I I did a lot of stuff working with kids in um, you know, like in in very challenging circumstances. That's always been of interest to me. So I it just is an extension of that. I don't philanthropy is a tricky thing because it's very embarrassing and very difficult to ask for money. I know you do that a lot, and and it's difficult to ask for money without thinking, why should they give it to me? And I'm and that is the express nature of my of my email to you. I'm writing an email to ask you for money, and I'm gonna tell you that you should be looking at the fact that children are dying and people are in this desperate situation. And I I wrote these letters feeling embarrassed, and then this wonderful rabbi who was working on um on Fiddler on the Roof as a consultant, um, Rabbi uh Larry Hoffman.

I I started the letter with I know you receive millions, you know, many of these uh queries daily about who needs your money and I really apologize for putting one more into your mailbox and he immediately wrote back the mouse needs the hole the mouse needs to drop the cheese and take the cheese out of a little hole and you should know that we are all like little mice and if you present a hole for us it is a gift we don't have to go down that hole don't apologize you're showing something that you're interested in and if I don't want to give you money I'll just say that's wonderful and I'll move on it's my job to say no don't apologize and I was so um I was very helped by thinking that that is it if you have money it makes you feel good to be able to give it so that's um I've learned a lot about philanthropy and about how to be simple in my and through Jenny Gerston also how to be simple in my requests.

[37:53] Jessica Hecht: I also can say that philanthropy, as you really embody, is not just about writing a check and giving money; it's about the sweat equity that you put into it. Some people who can't donate or some people choose to say, you know what, I'm not going to write a check; I want to get personally involved, and I want to do the work. So that's philanthropy too.

[38:17] Jan Svendsen: No, it's such a great point. There is a certain kind of—there's a word for it that they're using now, which is like activated philanthropy. It's something about the fact that there is a gesture on the part of the person donating that requires physical attention.

[38:40] Jessica Hecht: My friend Maura Tierney, the superb actress Maura Tierney, who was in my class—of course, you guys know her from The Affair and from ER—she wrote to me when I was in her class at NYU, and I did send these requests to people who had big TV shows, I'll be honest. She wrote right back and said, "I would be happy to donate if you would let me be involved," as you're saying. She said, "Just meet with me." And then she said, "I don't know what I could do. I can talk to people, and I can teach them English, and I can sew a costume. I don't want any fancy job; I just want to go." She was the most intuitive team member, and she gave a tremendous amount of money, but she also devoted her time and has now become an essential team member.

[39:40] Jan Svendsen: There's something about saying, like exactly what you're saying, that I think is the wave of the future.

[39:46] Jessica Hecht: Well, you also brought up a good point earlier that when you're of service to somebody, or you give back, you're doing it for yourself because you feel good about it, right? Your daughter said that, right? She said you'll feel better, right?

[39:59] Jan Svendsen: Yeah, right.

[40:00] Jessica Hecht: Well, that's true. I think people want to feel that. I know that for me, you know, writing a check, it feels good, but getting into it, you know, getting active in a more profound way feels better. From a purely selfish point of view, if you want to look at it that way, you're getting more fulfillment out of that, or at least I do. Not everybody does, but I understand that motivation.

[40:30] Jan Svendsen: Speaking of your kids, I wanted to ask you, how do you instill that spirit of giving and social impact to your children?

[40:40] Jessica Hecht: Yeah, that's a wonderful question, Jan. I think there is no way that you can force a specific kind of activism. We are not all comfortable with the same kind of involvement in the human struggle. That does not say anything about how interested you are in the human struggle, but we are not all wired that way. Our daughter was very interested in teaching math to inner-city kids, which is a wonderful endeavor because tutoring kids. Right around the time that I was doing this, she went back and developed this thing called the Girls Do Math initiative, and I said to her, "Well, this is amazing. When I go to Juarez in El Paso, maybe you would come with me and work with these kids there." She said, "Maybe.

I don't know that I'm comfortable with that. I have to do it my way." I think that what you can instill is that you have the capability of reaching outside of your comfort level and engaging with things that matter to you. Just find what matters to you; it should not be what matters to me.

[42:05] Our son got involved in food banks. He had to do a community service thing, and he said, "I would love to organize." The specificity—all of anybody listening to this will recognize these gestures that we all make. It's so interesting what our comfort level is, and just to tell your kids that they should open their hearts to what could be of help, but not in any way dictate what that is. I feel bad for in any way making them feel less than because they didn't do something like I did. I mean, I had Mark Ruffalo inspire me. I was in a big play with Mark Ruffalo telling me, "You should do it." So of course I did it, but your kids have an amazing role model, and I think that that's really important.

[43:01] Jan Svendsen: I've had several guests on this podcast, and I would say, you know, the majority of them have said that their spirit of philanthropy, whatever that means, was something that was modeled by their parents or by their family members. Clearly, your kids have that going for them.

[43:20] Jessica Hecht: Just a little segue now, sort of outside of the philanthropic stuff, because I just want to talk a little bit about your career. You've played such a variety of roles, and as a matter of fact, I was watching the latest episode of Younger last night, and there you were. It's so fun because you're in The Affair; there are so many shows that you're in. I just wondered, how do you select the roles? Is there something you're looking for, or is there something you're not looking for?

[43:58] Jessica Hecht: I'm very interested in writing that's about relationships, writing that makes sense to me emotionally. I think that now there's so much incredible TV writing that that's the first thing. The only thing that I really shy away from—and I know this sounds like I just sort of Pollyanna-ish—but I really can't be involved in projects that have children as victims. If it's something with, as I said, with pedophilia or anything like that, except for something as brilliant as Spotlight, but something of that nature, right? That would be different. I'm very sensitive to the way in which people tell stories that involve children and violence. I'm just a very squeamish person, and those subjects are so difficult for me as a human being that it has to be really on a high, high level.

[44:59] Jan Svendsen: Your role in Special, you play the mother of a gay man with cerebral palsy, right?

[45:04] Jessica Hecht: Yeah.

[45:05] Jan Svendsen: What drew you to that, and what's so special about Special?

[45:07] Jessica Hecht: You know, that's like for me an example of great writing that didn't have a home when I got that script. We didn't have a home, and Netflix ultimately picked it up, but my friend Jim Parsons was producing, and I thought the writing was really superb. It was about a mother who was so validating to her kid as a gay, disabled young man that they both had lost the ability to move forward in life. Someone said, "You don't have kids so that they stay home; you want them to launch." They neither of them launched until, spoiler alert, until the very end of the second season. It's based on the memoir of somebody, so it is a very graphic, beautiful story about the failure to launch of two people and being okay with our own limitations. I think it's a beautifully written story. We're all trying to— we all have limitations, obviously—but that story is really about teaching your child that you are no less than anyone else.

[46:18] Jan Svendsen: There's one more question I wanted to ask you before we close. I've asked a lot of my guests this question. Broadway just announced it's reopening, and life is getting back to some kind of new normal supposedly soon. I wondered if you could wave your magic wand, what changes do you hope will happen in the entertainment industry going forward?

[47:16] Jessica Hecht: Well, there are two things. I hope that we exist in an environment free from verbal and emotional violence of any kind. I certainly feel that many creative people operate from a place of turmoil. That's always going to be the case. We all know we don't all operate from a big open sunny heart of, "Oh, I want to just do beautiful work." I probably sound that way on this podcast, but I also operate at times from a place of turmoil. I don't want our own turmoil as artists to actually be hurtful to others, and I hope that we can find balance in that aspect of how we create. I think it's incredible the changes we want to make, and I hope that we can find them without shame. I hope we can move forward without too much shame to say that we are human and we made some really serious mistakes, and now let's move forward and keep everyone together as much as possible.

[47:59] Jan Svendsen: That's a perfect way to end this. You're such a thoughtful person, and I so appreciate you being on this podcast. Let's all move forward.

[48:09] Jessica Hecht: You're beautiful. Thank you. It's such an honor, and I'm so happy to see your face.

[48:15] Jan Svendsen: Next time we meet in New York, there will be no Le Pain Quotidien; they've sadly gone out of business.

[48:22] Jessica Hecht: I know.

[48:24] Jan Svendsen: But we will maybe—

[48:26] Jessica Hecht: Yeah, we'll find a place and really reconnect. You're excellent.

[48:30] Jan Svendsen: Thank you.

[48:32] Jessica Hecht: Thanks for listening to this episode of Broadway Gives Back. Broadway Gives Back is part of the Broadway Podcast Network, produced by Dori Berinstein and Alan Seales with Brittany Bigelow, and music by Eric Becker at Broderick Street Music. Special thanks to my producing partner, writer, and friend, Jim Lochner, and to Katie and Yo at BPN, Julian Hills from the Bulldog Agency, the Charity Network, and to my fiancé, Glenn Weiss, who is always my consultant.

[49:02] Jan Svendsen: If you like what you hear, don't forget to subscribe and rate this podcast wherever you stream your podcasts. You can also follow Broadway Gives Back on Facebook and Instagram at Broadway Gives Back Podcast and on Twitter at Broadway Gives. To learn more, visit bpn.fm slash Broadway GivesBack.