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[0:00] Mark-Eugene Garcia: Hello, and welcome to the Drama Book Show. My name is Mark-Eugene Garcia, and today we're talking about one of the most influential forces in American theater history, Zelda Fichandler. If you know her work, you already know she helped change the very structure of American theater, where it lives, who it serves, and what it believes about itself. If you don't, you're about to meet someone whose ideas still shape almost every non-profit theater in the country. Zelda was a founding force behind Arena Stage, one of the first major regional theaters in the United States, and later went on to lead the Graduate Acting Program at New York University. Over the course of her life, she didn't just build institutions.

She helped invent a movement. Two books anchor today's conversation. The Long Revolution, Sixty Years on the Front Lines of a New American Theater, gathers six decades of Zelda Fichandler's essays, speeches, and manifestos. It charts her thinking on everything from the institution as artwork to the profit in non-profit, alongside reflections of race, aesthetics, creativity, and the public imagination. It also includes her production notes and portraits of the artists she worked with, offering a portrait of one of the most expansive and provocative thinkers in American theater. And, To Repair the World, Zelda Fichandler and the Transformation of American Theater by Mary B. Robinson, is an oral history biography built from the voices of 174 artists, collaborators, and students.

With a foreword by Jane Alexander, it traces Zelda's impact through the people she shaped, actors like James Earl Jones, Stacey Keech, and the generations of students from NYU who describe how she helped them become citizen artists. Woven through are Zelda's own words, drawn from decades of correspondence and interviews. So our guest today will carry this history forward. Todd London is a writer, educator, and long-time leader in American non-profit theater, the first recipient of the TCG Visionary Leadership Award, and an advocate for artists across the field. Mary B. Robinson is a director, teacher, and writer whose career spans four decades, whose work has been recognized with honors, including the Alan Schneider Directing Award, and whose scholarship has helped document the collaborative art of directing and theater making.

Together, these books and these voices open up a portrait of Zelda Fichandler, not just as a theater maker, but as someone who fundamentally reshaped how American theater understands itself. So, let's begin.

[3:16] Mark-Eugene Garcia: Oh, hi. Thank you for coming. I'm starting off this little hour journey about Zelda Fichandler, and I don't know if you're here because you either know her, or you're curious about her, or you know nothing about the theater, and someone has asked you to come, so I'm trying to figure out how I might introduce Zelda to you. I teach acting at NYU Graduate Acting Program, and I met Zelda 20 years ago, and she changed my life. She's changed the theater's life. She's changed, I guess we can say, in some way the country's life, by making us aware of what theater is, and she's one of the more inspiring people I've met. I don't know if you look back over your life, there are only a few people who seem to be working at such an extraordinary level that everything they say seems revelatory in some way.

It makes you think higher, and better, and bigger about the human condition, and that is why Zelda went into theater, because she wanted to change the human condition through art. And if I can just pose a little question to you secretly, what do you think is maybe the most important part of theater? Is it the playwright? Is it the writer? Is it the actor? Is it the director? Zelda thought it was the actors, because she thought that without the actors embodying a character and giving it a soul, and allowing you to feel empathetic, then there would be no way for us to understand each other through the emotional journeys of others. She wanted us to climb inside their shoes. So it was big. And so I'm going to start by just reading who Zelda was, a section of Todd's book, so you can get an idea of that, and then we'll move into Mary's book, and we'll have all sorts of hopefully little gems for you to hear and be inspired by.

Some things to know, if you don't know, about Zelda Fichandler. She co-founded Arena Stage, one of America's first regional theaters in 1950, and led it for 40 years. With two other women, Margo Jones and Nina Vance, she pioneered a movement to foster American culture by establishing professional theaters outside of New York and across the land. She put the resident in the regional theater movement by keeping the artistic company full salary year-round ensemble of actors at the heart of her national vision. Through the power of her example and mind, she became the principal architect and guiding force behind this non-profit art theater movement. Never acknowledged as a writer, she is, in depth of thought about the art, the peer of anyone who has ever written about the theater.

In a legally segregated Washington, she was the first to integrate theater audiences. In 1968, she began a process to fully integrate Arena Stage by rebuilding the salaried acting company. When, by her own light, she failed, she tried again 20 years later. This time she launched a plan to overhaul the entire institution and create a truly culturally diverse company of artists, production staff, and administration. After running Arena with distinction for 40 years, she found her greatest professional joy leading and teaching in a graduate acting program at New York University, which she did for another 25 years, seven while running Arena Stage. Over six decades in the field, she never lost sight of the deepest purposes of theater and our common humanity.

She was one of the wisest people I and American theater has ever met. She was wise because she never stopped learning. Through her writing and speeches and her penetrating, thought-provoking intellect, the conscience of the field she begat. If you love the theater or live the theater, if you act or direct or write or administer or fund, if you want to know how American culture finds shape and solidity and then challenges itself to change, then Zelda's living history is yours. It is ours. Through it all, Zelda wrote. She performed a mythic feat. She theorized the revolution, planned it, staged the battles, readied the troops, and rallied the allies. Always in the midst of battle, she redesigned strategy, rebuilt the instruments of engagement, and then, in the quiet of the night, though the night was never quiet, pursued the deepest questions of her struggle.

Why do we need to change? What does it say about our species, about our humanness, that we perform our lives thus? She pondered ambition and retreat, progress and stasis. Even as the maelstrom raged, she noticed the landscape, the surrounding trees, homes, cities, and fields. She paid close attention to the faces in the blur and to the feelings etched on those faces. She wondered what makes them tick. Of course, the revolution was a theatrical one, the battlefield of American culture. As with every revolution, the real prize was hearts and minds. But that speaks a lot to our writer, Todd London, too. So, that gives you a taste of Zelda, and I would like to introduce the two writers who thousands of us were so glad that they culled together all the material on Zelda and put it together in two wonderful books because we all felt it was needed. I introduce to you Todd London and Mary Robinson.

[10:01] Mark-Eugene Garcia: Should we change it up a little? Sure. I'll go here.

[10:17] Mark-Eugene Garcia: That is Janet Zarish.

[10:24] Mary B. Robinson: So, Todd and I are going to introduce each other to get us started, but Mark, of course, already did some introduction. I don't care what he was saying, so I just want to fill in a few details about Todd London. The books, I think all of them are here in the Drama Bookshop, are An Ideal Theater, The Importance of Staying Earnest, Outrageous Fortune, The Artistic Home, and others. I've read all of them, and he's an absolutely phenomenal theater writer. In fact, I remember when I heard that he was going to work with Zelda and then take over the project, I just thought there just couldn't be a more wonderful marriage of two theater minds. I think you heard that he's taught at Yale, Harvard, NYU, the New School, University of Washington.

His awards include the George G. Nathan Award for Dramatic Criticism, an honorary doctorate from DePaul University's Schools of Theater and Music, and I think this was said, but I just have to emphasize it, the first Visionary Leadership Award from Theater Communications Group. Of course, he was artistic director of Andromedas for 18 years. I'm going to go sit, because I'm going to need some notes from Mike. No, I won't. I'll stay, because I'll get them later. Yes, so Todd.

[11:35] Todd London: Thank you, Mary. I'll introduce Mary. Thank you for that. Thank you, Janet. I'm so glad that you're all here. They said very nicely about my writing, but as I was listening to the introduction that Janet was reading to Zelda's book, really, this is her writing. I edited down. I realized how much of the sort of grammar and syntax of her thought had entered my introductory words. I kept hearing phrases that were like, I stole that from Zelda's mind. I didn't actually say that. So Mary and I are each going to talk a little bit about how we came to embark on these projects, and then our friends are going to read a little bit from each of the books, which are very different. Mary's is an oral history.

This is a collection of 50 years of Zelda's own writings, speeches, letters, pieces of grant proposals, essays, things in the middle of the night, things early in the morning. But first, I'm going to, and then we're going to talk a little, and if you have questions, we will do our best to not answer them. So this is from the introduction, but it explains how I came to edit Zelda's book, including after her death. I met Zelda many times over a 40-year span. I swear I remember every time. I even remember when I first heard of her, standing with my directing teacher in a college hallway.

[13:10] Todd London: And I remember the second time, when a girlfriend at that same college auditioned for Arena's Apprenticeship Program. She recounted what Zelda had said at the audition. "You're so calm," Zelda reportedly said, surprised at the young actress's unflappability. I remember hearing my employers talking about her throughout the 80s, in Washington, D.C., in theaters, and at theater communications groups' offices in New York City. They spoke of her with simple awe, always as Zelda, the way the ancients might have spoken of Moses. And I remember each of the four colleagues who introduced me to her, including in her own theater, where I was assistant directing a holiday reading. These introductions occurred many years apart, because, as you might guess, Zelda did not remember me.

I also remember during a 1987 Artistic Director retreat at Storm King Art Center in New York, the first words other than hello that she spoke to me. I was there to help facilitate the meeting and write about it for what would become my first book, The Artistic Home. She was there to be Zelda. She spoke to me exactly twice, challenging me both times. One, I introduced her to the woman at my side. "She's my wife," I said. "I'm sure she's a lot more than that," correct as ever. Two, at some point in the day-long retreat, I posed a question to the table of artistic leaders. She turned the table on me. "What do you think?" I mumbled something like, "I don't think anything, I'm just the writer here."

She stared at me hard as though to remember the face she would soon forget for 37 years when she would ask me to be the keeper of her legacy project. Imagine how not calm, how utterly flappable I was when around 2013 and out of the blue, she called me. "Tala, this is Zel," she said as if we'd been to the movies the night before and she'd left her lipstick in my car. "Zel, what's the diminutive of Moses?" She wouldn't recognize me on the street, but apparently she'd been reading me for years. She claimed to have spent the past several weeks rereading me. By a quirk of timing, I had two books out that year, my own essay collection, 25 years in the making that I now learned that Mary gave to her, and an ideal theater which contained founding visions for a century of American theaters of all stripes.

I'd quoted Zelda on the fly leaf, quote, "Separately and then together we forged these theaters, we forged a better way, we scratched it out, hacked it, ripped it, tore it, yanked it, clawed it out of the resisting, unyielding, nose-thumbing environment." In the introduction to an essay of hers, I called her the great founding rabbi of the American theater. Over the next few months, Zel called to speak to me about my writing and hers. She spoke about the field and how happy she'd been at NYU. She advised me through a professional transition and encouraged me to take a job at the University of Washington. "Todd, this is Zel. I dreamt about you last night. You have to take that job in Seattle.

You're a teacher." When Zel tells you where to go, you go there. "You'll be so happy," she said. I wasn't, but I don't blame her. She asked me for my help with her book and had Angie Moy, her assistant and longtime pillar of support, send me pages and files, adding to the boxes my family was packing for the move. Before I left Brooklyn for the Pacific Northwest, she invited me to spend a few days with her in her apartment in the Colorama neighborhood of Northwest D.C. I'd never been alone with Zel, even for a minute, and though I was 57 years old, I suddenly felt as if I'd never been alone with anyone. That nervous. I tried on and discarded numerous outfits, though I don't own outfits. I worried about our meals together, unsure of what to do if she served me bell peppers, which I don't like, or if she found me uncouth or noticed arugula in my tea.

I knew Zel suffered from intense pain from fibromyalgia, and I wondered how it might manifest. If I shook her hand, would she scream? They were the nerves you might feel when, in an arranged marriage, you're about to meet your intended for the first time. Like that, or also like her sneaking off to have an affair in late life, carrying a baggage of years, buzzing with old-timey expectations. Should I bring flowers? Chocolate? Will we hug at the door? Sit on a bed together? Kiss goodbye? I was in a state, and though I did my best to disguise it, the state lasted for the three days we spent together over papers and lunches, stories and reminiscences, as though we'd known each other for a hundred years, which we had and hadn't. I was Zelda's guide, by golly, and would remain so even after her death, because when Zelda chooses you.

She called me in Seattle at regular intervals over the next 18 months, and we continued our affair of the heart, mind, and book. I would pace the living room from window to window, looking out at the camellias and Japanese maple, listening, confiding, trying across the 3,000 miles and 33 years that separated us to stay present, to build an honest relationship based on Zelda-esque inquiry, elaboration, and exactitude. Maybe, I thought, she holds the key to becoming a wise elder. How to stay truly alive as an artist and human, how to resist fixity in the backward tides of age, I needed her to teach me. She sat notes, sometimes scrawled in the margins of Xerox essays or speeches she'd uncovered, and letters.

"I think of you daily, though you haven't heard a word from me." She would talk about her progress or lack of on the book. "I've been in and out of the hospital with complex physical issues. I'm used to pain, but this patch has been and is being harder and has slowed me down by making concentration very difficult and using my time and attention. I write to let you know I'm still here and wrestling and need to continue as long as I have breath." In the next sentence, her attention returns to the events in the DC theater scene as if they, for this 90-year-old matriarch, were the only matters of life and death. Then, in February 2016, facing a surgery for which she feared she might not fully recover, she called again.

"I have an important question to ask you," she said, suddenly tentative. I wish I could remember her exact words, because it was the single most extraordinary conversation of my professional life. She asked whether I would be willing to take charge of her papers if she couldn't continue to work. Would I do her the kindness of finishing the book for her? I don't recall what she said, because I knew what she was asking. This I remember, my heart's thunder, face going still, tears pooling. She carried on as though apologizing for a burdensome request she was laying on me, as though it might be an option to say no to her. This time I didn't mumble. I took calming breaths and searched for words beyond the clichés bubbling up, honor of a lifetime, humble, involved, in a mood, oh God, yes, of course.

I don't want to leave you with the sense that Zelda, by placing her papers, her baby, into my hands after her decades of deep consideration and doodling, was acting on instinct or sentiment. Though the moment was a deeply emotional passage, as she entrusted this life of writing to my care. It was a dramatic scene, and we played it for real, because it was real. But Zelda was nothing if not strategic. She left little to chance. Practiced in the art of casting, she also made sure her chosen actors would follow direction. She had already sought confirmation from our mutual friends that I could be trusted to follow through. I found this out later. As if trust weren't enough, she sought additional assurances that they would check up on me and make sure I got the job done. Brilliant revolutionary leader that she was, she possessed just the right blend of Chekhov and Don Corleone. "Here you go, Zelda. You made me an offer I couldn't refuse, and we made it to Moscow."

[23:12] Todd London: And the Drama Book Shop. Thank you. I'm going to turn this over to Mary, who, wow, this was a work of love and transference and all that good thing. When you hear about Mary's project, you will be amazed. It's massive and a huge gift to all of us in the theatre. Mary, you've heard, she's a director, she's a writer, a teacher. I first met her and became aware of her when she became the first Alan Schneider theatre director, a major national award for directors named after Zelda's mentor and first resident director, as well as teacher, really, Alan Schneider. Mary's been an artistic director, she taught MFA directors at Brooklyn College, she ran the undergraduate directing program at New York University under the auspices of Playwrights Horizons Theatre School for many years, and has directed over 70 productions in regional and off-Broadway theatres, as well as at training programs like NYU Graduate Acting at Juilliard.

She's got another book, which is here, it's called Directing Plays, Directing People, a collaborative art, and that was published in 2012, and she is one of 50 directors, along with Zelda, profiled in the book American Women Stage Directors of the 20th Century. My friend and co-traveler, fellow traveler through this Yelba land, Mary, what's your name, Mary Robin.

[24:50] Mary B. Robinson: Thank you. Janet, can you just hand me everything under there, because my notes are somewhere else. There is a paper, there it is, that's what I need, thank you so much. Okay, thank you, Todd. I'm going to paraphrase my preface, rather than read from it, because I can't match Todd's amazing writing, and also it's a story that sort of covers up a pretty long period of decades, because I first encountered Zelda in 1975, when I was a senior in college, I was an aspiring director, with no idea what to do when I got out of college. I knew I didn't want to, I didn't think I wanted to come to New York, I knew I didn't want to work in the commercial theater, but I didn't know what else there was, and I also didn't know of any women who were in theater, and my theater department at my college put together a panel called, "What is regional theater, is it for you?" which was of course just an epiphany, the question was made for me, I sometimes think.

It was Zelda and three other artistic directors from the Northeast, she was the only woman on the panel, and I really learned about the range of resident, as she called them, or regional theaters all over the country, of course there are far more now than there were then, because some of them were just getting started in the 60s, this was about 10 years after a big crop of them came into being, so I learned about the context in which I was working.

[26:19] Mary B. Robinson: I hope to work, but I also was just so struck by Zelda herself, who was charismatic and eloquent and most of all, deeply inspiring. Even though I can't remember exactly what she said, I do remember how it made me feel. It made me feel that going into theater was not frivolous. Not that anybody had told me this, but it was something that I was wrestling with. I loved doing it so much, it just didn't seem that that was something you could make a life in or living in. But she talked about it as a calling. She talked about theater as an art form, which, you know, like visual arts or music, and an art form that uniquely can bring people together in a communal environment and connect them with each other across often big chasms.

I'm assuming that's what she said, because that's what she said every other time I heard her speak, pretty much. And what happened was I thought, that's who I want to be when I grow up. I want to be Zelda Fichandler. I want to direct in the short term and in the long term, I want to be the artistic director of original theater. And fast forward 15 years, and I did that after serving on the artistic staff of several other theaters and getting to know Zelda at some of the TCG conferences we both attended, but not trying hard not to be a fangirl whenever I ran into her. And then I was running a theater in Philadelphia, and Zelda came a couple of times to productions that I directed there because her son lived and lives in Philly.

And then the theater hit a terrible crisis, a financial crisis, but no crisis is ever just financial. It just eventually closed the theater. It was a really difficult time because this is, of course, what I had aspired to do for all these years. And I called Zelda and did not, as I say, know her well, but said, I need advice. I need somebody who's been there to talk with. And she was right there for me. We talked on the phone frequently. After the theater closed, she didn't drop me out of her life. We continued to get together for lunch. She brought me in to direct several plays at NYU Grad Acting. And really now in hindsight, I realize just how important she was that difficult year and a half.

She wrote me a letter at one point saying, I think you're at a very important time in your life because there's so many things, there's so many directions in which you might go. And the direction I went in was teaching, writing, directing less because my husband and I had a small child at that time. And she was also very interestingly helpful about that. She felt that she had actually been so dedicated to the theater that she had maybe missed out on some time with her two sons. And we knew each other somewhat for about 20 years. I knew about her book that she was working on. I was very excited that she was, that her speeches and essays would be collected. She read a draft of my book, gave me some thoughts.

And I knew when she died in 2016 that Todd had taken on the book. And all of us were just so excited about that. But I wondered, where's the memoir? Where's the, is somebody writing a biography? What Zelda herself should be written about? And about three years after she died, this would have been in 2019, I was talking to Laura Penn, the Executive Director of our union, the Directors and Choreographers Society, about the fact that, Zelda, by the way, was a very important person in her young professional life as well, about the fact that nobody seemed to be writing a book about her. And she said, why don't you do that? So I thought this over. I found out that her archives were in, were at George Mason University in Fairfax, Virginia.

Went down there for a few days in February 2020 and went through just a few of the 200 boxes of her papers. And there was just some wonderful stuff. I just scratched the surface. And I thought, I'm going to keep coming back here, find out if anybody else was doing this, and eventually I'll start interviewing people. That was February 2020. So the next month, of course, the archives closed for a year and a half. And I couldn't access them. I could find some things online. I could, I had books, like Todd's books, that had speeches that Zelda sent them to read. But I realized I had to start interviewing people to get anything, to get anywhere during the pandemic. But luckily everybody wanted to talk because nobody was working.

Everybody was lonely and isolated and just desperately happy to share their memories of Zelda and a better time. I started with people I knew well. So Kate and Janet were two of the first people I interviewed. I interviewed Angel a little bit later. This is Kate Fuglai. Angel Desai, I should mention, who we'll be reading later, and of course Janet Zarish. And in the year and a half that I couldn't get into the archives, I think I interviewed about 120 people and gradually decided that maybe this should be an oral history. And that was partly because that's what I was assembling, because I really didn't have the sort of information for the interstitial stuff to put it in context. I knew I needed to get back to the archives, but I was excited by the way the voices played off each other.

And also, so many people that I interviewed said what Janet said, actually, which is, she changed my life. And this is people who are now 90 years old and who were at the arena on 9th and 1950s, and from there on, obviously her students at New York University, but just people, even people who didn't know her well. Even directors, for instance, just found her, as I had, a role model and an inspiration. And when I got back to the archives in the fall of 2021, I did discover a lot of stuff that was really helpful for putting it all in context. And at that point in the process, I also had a conversation with Janet, who had read some chapters, and she said, I wish Zelda's voice was in this a little more.

And I thought, well, that is certainly possible because of all these wonderful letters I'm reading, and interviews she did, and in some cases, first draft of speeches she wrote, where she had handwritten notes that I would come across. Sometimes things that were very personal didn't make it into the final speech. And so, the result of the book is hybrid. I call it an oral history biography, and it is an oral history, but it has quite a bit of Zelda's voice into it too, sometimes from some of her speeches and her more formal writings, but often just little snippets of stuff I discovered that I thought would help bring her to life, hopefully. And just want to close by saying, I think she's one of these people who has such a layered legacy.

Her institutional legacy is, of course, Arena Stage and the NYU Grad Acting program, which existed before she came there, but she completely transformed it in the 25 years she was there in many ways. Her written legacy is, of course, the speeches in The Long Revolution, and many other speeches. A lot of her former students said, I've got a speech she gave at the beginning of the year. You want to use this? There's a lot more that didn't even go into the book because it was one volume. But what I wanted to capture with the book was her human legacy, and that is the people on whom she had such a profound effect. Myself, and everybody here, I would say, Laura Penn said something that I always remember. She said, her transformation of the theater was one person at a time.

[33:43] Todd London: Why don't we maybe start with her?

[33:49] Mary B. Robinson: With Angel?

[33:51] Todd London: Yeah, just with her.

[33:53] Mary B. Robinson: All right, it was about to change our order, but I'm not going to do that. On Mary's last point, when you talk to the students at NYU who studied while Zelda was there, often they remember the words she spoke on their first day of school. It's shocking how you carry that. I remember first days of school as being just like, what's going on? There's a lot going on. But she had that kind of power of spark, inspiration. We wanted to start there. This is an essay. I think it's called The Art of Lying. It started as a speech, and then she wrote it as an essay for American Theater Magazine. I'm going to introduce my friend and a favorite person, Angel Desai, who was a student at NYU, as she'll note.

She's an actor, singer, musician, and activist. Recent work includes Fallout on Amazon, recurring work on Law and Order reboot, Poker Face on Peacock, Blue Bloods, and the indies Sideways for Attention, Klutz, and Peas and Carrots, which is coming up, on Broadway, Company in 2006, numerous off-Broadway and regional theater credits, Actors Center Workshop, Company Member 2007, and yes, MFA from NYU, the wonderful Angel Desai.

[35:21] Angel Desai: Thank you, Zelda. Yes, I met Zelda when I was a student, and you would have her for her first year of class. She would also teach. Then when I graduated, unlike most of my classmates, I didn't have an agent. I wasn't auditioning. But Zelda was returning to Arena Stage, even though she had officially left by her artistic directorship at that point, I think. But she was returning to direct Uncle Vanya, and I managed to get an audition, and she cast me as Sonya, and that's how I got my Equity card. So I owe a tremendous amount to Zelda, and I only regret that I wasn't able to thank her more in person for how she changed my life. So anyway, from her speech.

[36:17] Angel Desai: Sela Adler once quoted her father, Jacob, patriarch of the Yiddish Theater, on the reasons why someone wants to become an actor. You don't want to get up early, you don't want to work, and you're afraid to steal. But seriously, why does someone want to become an actor? To enter that arena with the lions and subject oneself to rejection on a regular basis? To chance the masochism of love for a profession that makes no promise to love you back? To risk a life of tempting and maybe even poverty? To postpone having a committed relationship or raising a family? Why in the world would you even dream of becoming an actor, let alone audition for a graduate acting program, running up a debt that not only means you'll go without steak dinners and dental work, but that could define your choices until you're middle-aged?

Let's say you've chosen. You insist on it to defy the odds and become an artist at all costs, financial as well as psychic. In an act of strong will, and after a period of ambivalence, I'm sure, you've decided to make your way in a crowded, competitive, inhospitable profession. I congratulate you for that leap and offer some words of advice. At Tisch School of the Arts, where I teach, we ask our students to hang on stubbornly to the why of their presence. There are periods of not knowing how one thing relates to another. An actor in training must live in that state, in moments of doubt or fatigue or tedium, when you're doing repetitions for a voice class or memorizing lines or rehearsing a scene at a god-awful time of night.

When you think that you'll never live up to expectations, repeat the mantra of your commitment and stay the course. Since you know why you are on this path and how urgent it is for you, please give your teachers your trust. The longer you withhold it, the longer will the changes within you be delayed. Do your best to be open and vulnerable. Surrender cynicism. If you experience fear or shame, thrust through it. If you enjoy the work, that's a real bonus. You should expect to feel joy. Adopt an attitude of curiosity that will lead you into the work rather than away from it. In your training, you will be bombarded with many new things to do and new ways to do the things you've always done. The hardest thing may turn out to be not what we traditionally think of as working, not physical or even intellectual effort, but rather the act of surrendering, of allowing things to happen to you instead of lunging after them. Numberless demands are made on us, even before we're old enough to internalize them. Clean your plate or you can't go out to play. You have seven minutes.

[39:29] Todd London: It takes time to dissolve the restrictions of an educational system where answers are either right or wrong, and where uniqueness can be perceived as disruptive. Be patient as you discover the ways in which you are not replaceable like anyone else. I return to my first question, why would someone want to be an actor? The response to this is crucial. It is the reason I've been besotted with the theater for most of my life. If I had the gift of being an actor, I would have bent my will, energy, time, and money to become the very best one I could be. I chose instead to produce, direct, teach, and especially to create structures that make it possible for others to live their lives as actors. Actors are the very center of the theatrical experience, for only a human being can embody another human being.

It's to see what can happen to a human in this time between two darknesses, and imaginatively, what could happen to one's own self, that audiences need the living experience of theater. Each of us is given but one life, the life of a fly measured against eternity. That life might seem to us free in terms of choice and possibility. In limited ways, it is, but in major ways, it is quite determined. Chromosomes decide our sex, the color of our skin and eyes, our bone structure, our predisposition to certain talents and tastes, and even to the illnesses that ultimately will whisk us away. The one life we have is determined, too, by how the knobs of inherited characteristics are turned by the culture into which we happen to be born.

Do we want to be hemmed in by one fate? For a creature with high imagination, naturally empathetic, curious, and daring, is one life enough? The possibilities of other lives within us propel some to be part of the maddening, glorious world of theater. The following is my why for sustaining a life in the theater for half a century. The ottomans, my friends and neighbors, visitors of different colors, the despairing who lead tight, slick, and scribed lives, the rich and comfortable who, in the dark, may experience guilt, and the rich and comfortable whose hunger can never be assuaged, the wide-eyed children in their one good dress, the lonely one in a single seat, the masons in their funny hats, the cognizant and the non-knowing, the old who can forget about dying for a few hours, the egoists, the damned, the teenagers who, under their rubato and with rings in every part of their anatomy, yearn to be useful, the audience, the terminus of all our work.

God bless them all. They enter into a conspiracy of belief with us, and it would not be moral to betray them. Theater fabricates everything from the storm's roar to the life's song, from the actor's laugh to her nightly flood of tears. The actor opens us to a new understanding of ourselves. What could be more important than that?

[43:15] Mary B. Robinson: Thank you so much, Angel. It makes me want to be a student again. So I'm going to introduce Janet Zaresh, who is going to read. Janet will be the only person reading from *To Repair the World, My Oral History Tonight*, even though, as I say, Kate and Angel are both in it, but they're part of larger stories, whereas Janet is going to read four or five segments that cover—that are in three different chapters, because she knew Zelda for quite a long time at NYU and beyond. So Janet Zaresh is Associate Arts Professor at NYU's Graduate Acting Program, where she has taught for nearly three decades. She's acted on and off-Broadway, in regional theaters, and in film and television. She was a member of the acting company under John Hausman and directed their off-Broadway production of *Magic for Magic*.

I have to quickly say that I took up Zelda's class when I started teaching at NYU, and I read that speech—it's a little longer, I have a longer version—she quotes Arthur Miller, but I do it every year, and at the end of reading it, all my 16 students are in tears. They all ask for a copy. Okay, yeah, I'm just going to jump into—I think I'm starting with Zelda's—oh, yeah, Zelda coming up to me and telling me I should direct. At one point, she came to me and said, I think you need to direct. I don't understand why she said that. I never expressed that I wanted to, I never mentioned directing. So I directed *As You Like It*, and then *The Winter's Tale*, and I was screaming, why is she making me do this?

I don't know what I'm doing. After *Winter's Tale*, she wrote me a letter which said, you are a fine director. I was impressed with much of the work of the students, but what made me happiest was the development of your own work. She's done this a couple of times to me, where it almost feels like she had been keeping an eye on me, and a year, two years, three years later, she would say something that would reveal to me what she saw in me, and those moments actually changed my life. Now, you earned getting her giggling side. She was a giggler, and she would break into funny songs all the time. You'd be talking to her, and she'd say something like, I think we need to do a play, because there's that beautiful garden scene that no one seems to get right.

She'd go through the tulips, and she would just start singing a 1930s song. She'd do it constantly. She'd always break into these little divvy songs, and sometimes over the phone, we couldn't stop laughing. We'd start saying, stop, stop, my stomach hurts, stop, but there was not a middle ground. There was that part. There was the mother, but then there was the businesswoman. She could be my mother, and she could go, oh, darling, and hug me, and this and that, and then when it came to my contract, it was like, damn, I'm the boss now, and I keep separate worlds. This fibromyalgia got so bad that she really couldn't walk well. She couldn't get around well enough to navigate going uptown to the dentist, so I would start driving her places.

One time, we were driving up Madison Avenue, and all of a sudden, she said, Janet, you know you are a very good driver. You have a talent for this. You look, you breathe, you soak up the situation, you're steady, you're calm, you take everything in very good. The way she said it, I knew she wasn't talking about only driving. She was giving me a clue as to how to be in the world. She was my mentor in so many different ways. She had the art of dropping a penny in front of you very gently, or maybe a feather that floats to the ground. Sometimes I'd look at people, and I'd go, did you just get what she just gave you? Because she'd give them in a very nondirect way. She doesn't want to presume that she was trying to tell you what to do, but she was a master at understanding people, which is why she loved theater so much, because she wanted to see to the core of characters.

She got diminished in her capacity to lead because she was managing so much pain. A lot of times, she wasn't there at school. When she was there, her temper got a little shorter. She had an impatience about her. I think she spent a lot of time knowing she shouldn't be there, but she just couldn't let go. The only reason she stopped was she was in great pain. She probably should have left about two years earlier, maybe three, but as she said, work is my life. She just couldn't imagine not working, and she couldn't imagine not being involved in any students' lives. I was on the phone with her about three years after she retired, and I asked her how she was doing, and did she miss being at NYU?

She said, I miss the school. I miss shepherding those kids. I really miss the mothering, and the being present in the process of growth, which is so perceptible day by day, week by week, month by month. It's a short form of a lifelong process as they mature and hold their heads up and turn their voices out and experience their presence growing larger, and that happening in front of you. So that's what I miss most. I started taking notes. I typed it while she was talking it. Yeah, that's how she spontaneously talked.

[50:27] Kate Puglie: Thank you. Kate Puglie is an actor, singer, and writer who has performed at La Jolla Playhouse, New York Shakespeare Festival, Arena Stage, Hartford Stage. She was recently seen in the amazing production of Liz Suedo's *Beautiful Lady* at La Mama, directed by Anne Bogart, and she has appeared in many film and television shows, and I just want to say, Kate is one of the first actors I met when I moved to New York many years ago, and also that I saw you in the production of *Crime and Punishment* at Arena Stage that you might mention. Here's Kate.

[51:17] Kate Puglie: Zelda taught me an unforgettable lesson about the value of standing up for yourself. I was hired by Arena Stage and by extension Zelda to play Sonia in a seminal production of *Crime and Punishment* in the late 80s. It was directed by Yuri Lebemov, a renowned Russian theater director and artist that Zelda had worked for many years to bring to America. He was indeed brilliant. It also became clear that he was from a patriarchal system that deemed it okay to treat younger women with insulting and abusive behavior. After about three weeks, I had enough. We had a verbal, knock-down, drag-out fight at a rehearsal. I recall him saying, I was directing theater in Russia when my mother was born. My response?

You are not in America now, and we don't treat people that way. Rehearsal was canceled. I fully expected to be fired. I went home that night and packed my bags, but the call never came. I headed for rehearsal the next day. I could see the Washington Monument in the background. As luck would have it, Zelda was there.

[52:39] Todd London: Zelda pulled up just as I got to the parking lot. She got out of her car, unmistakable, in a crisp pantsuit and that helmet of coiffed hair. She walked toward me. What was going to happen? She gave me a big bear hug and said, "I've known several geniuses in my life. He's one, Alan Schneider was another, but we can't let them bully us, can we? Now, go back in there and do your work." Lubimov treated me with respect from then on. To me, Zelda was a living example of standing up for yourself, standing up for others while getting the work done. This is from a speech that Zelda gave to the NEA. "Chairman and distinguished members of the subcommittee, I'm grateful for this opportunity to present testimony on funding for the National Endowment for the Arts on behalf of the Theater Communications Group, the American Arts Alliance, and Arena Stage, the theater I co-founded and have headed for 40 years.

I first wish to thank the chairman and members of the subcommittee for their commitment to the endowment's principles of creativity and freedom of expression during the heated debate in Congress last year, echoes of which have not yet subsided. Since the late 40s and early 50s, the American theater has been engaged in a revolution, a long revolution filled with stops and starts, periods of renewal and periods of plateau, moods of high energy alternating with despair, a kind of manic depressive roller coaster whose ups and downs are especially acute at this time. The revolution began with a small group of people who were fed up with current ways of making theater and who committed themselves to finding new ones and having them prevail.

From a handful of theaters around 1950, the year of Arena's birth, there are now more than 400 all over the United States playing to over 19 million people a year, regularly producing new American and foreign plays, interesting revivals, and world classics and contemporary interpretations. Uncovering ever broader audiences through a moderate ticket pricing policy, taking on the central question of cultural diversity on stage and in the audience, fulfilling their responsibilities in the area of training artists and administrators and engaging more actors and other theater artists outside of New York than are engaged within New York, the erstwhile capital of the American theater. Indeed, it is to these professional theater companies that Broadway now turns for its primary source of talent and energy.

Actors, directors, designers, and of course the new playwrights from whom all other production arts flow, only the multi-million dollar musical remains as the signifying mark of Broadway. What has been built in roughly the past third of a century is an American national theater, the fastest growth of a new form for the arts in history. It is a theater admired the world over, especially in Eastern Europe for its energy, its artistry, its originality, its playwrights, for its amazing survival with a minimum of government support. It is admired and envied for its freedom of descent, up to now unhampered. The originating thought of our theatrical revolution was really quite simple. It was that theater should stop serving the function of making money for which it has never been and never will be suited, and help reveal and shape the process of living for which it is uniquely suited, for which it indeed insists.

This new radical though simple thought was that theater should be reclaimed from commerce and restored to itself as a form of art, an ancient and ever-changing art form, where life in all its complexity happens before our eyes. Paradoxically, what was needed to make this art form prevail over the controlling influence of marketplace was money. Federal dollars give us nourishment, warmth, dignity, a place at the table, acknowledgment that we're doing a good job. They fluff up our sagging spirits, strengthen our will, gird our right arm, and most importantly, pry loose resources from private corporations. By the matching requirements, tap our communities on the shoulder and ask them to look up, please.

Does it really matter in the end? What if it were all to fall apart? What, after all, is the American theater up against the rest of the story? The despair and hopelessness of the poor, the bewilderment of the mentally ill in their barracks and shelters, the scourge of AIDS, the flight from reality into the haze of cocaine, the despoiling of the air and water, the accumulating illiteracy of our young, do we over-traumatize the case for drama? Are the arts not a flourish, an added extra attraction that we can live without? How would we think of these things? Before the city, there was the hamlet and the village. Before the village, the camp and the cairn. Even before these, there was the cave.

Inside the cave, there were great natural chambers covered with paintings of astonishing vividness of form and facility of design, exquisitely realistic animals or highly formalized and stylized men and women, art of enormous aesthetic mastery. One paleolithic drawing on the wall of a cave in France depicts a man dressed in the skin of a stag, wearing antlers on his head, presumably a wizard. An early actor trying, even then, over the rim of history to imitate some other presence in order to influence nature and imagine his fate. In the rights of the caves, if anywhere, we find the first hints of our civilization, not alone for the carnal rewards of the hunt or some source of water, not for a place of safe mating or protection against the elements or the barbarian, but for a more meaningful and enchanting life, for abundance of spirit, to share with others the daylight fantasy and the nighttime dream.

Men gathered and made their enclaves. An old Egyptian scribe tells us that when cities were first built, the mission of the founders was to put the gods in their shrines. Art and thought, giving form to imagination, recording the past and the activities of the present, extending in time backward and forward, attending to the care and culture of men. I testify on behalf of all our theaters that we must nourish our storytellers, for without them we will have lost our childhood and with our childhood, who we might become.

[1:01:36] Todd London: And this speech from Theater and Human Identity, Zelda's address to the Washington School of Psychiatry. Theater speaks to all the big questions that the child asks. What is death? Where will I go when I die? Who am I? Where do I stop and you begin? What is God? What is the meaning of life? How can I get what I want? Why am I being punished? Why did my balloon burst? Where did mommy disappear to? Will she come back? Why must I give up my secrets? Will somebody always be there to love me? Will my nightmares come true? If I think it, will it happen? All the big questions of life. By the time she is an adult, the child has learned to ask the smaller questions and most likely to ask them of science.

But the child who lives on in us asks the big questions only art can answer. All the world's a stage and all the men and women merely players, Shakespeare tells us. And we are guilty creatures sitting at a play. No, we are guilty creatures sitting in a play. We are personages in our own drama, the art of theater, the dramatic experience starts just here within the subjective experience of each one of us. I start with this very moment as theater does. And since I know myself somewhat better than I know any one of you, I start with myself as a character. What is my sense of reality at the moment? Who am I? As if that were answerable. How did I come to be this way? Wordsworth said, "Trailing clouds of glory do we come from God who is our home."

Not many of us buy that anymore. I hold these pages in my hand. It is 10 o'clock. I need new glasses. I feel annoyed about that. I want to do a good job to get my thoughts over to you in a clear and meaningful way. Perhaps I should have worn other shoes. I spiral out a little. I am a teacher, a director. I head up some things. I have accomplished some things and I have a sense of that. My New York City apartment on Washington Square hangs in the sky and gives me a great sense of space. My house in DC's Cleveland Park is full of a family's memories, sometimes sad to be in. I have certain friends, certain relationships, certain cups and saucers, certain pieces of art, certain chairs, certain pots and pans, an 82-year-old housekeeper.

I too am getting older. I spiral out a bit more. It's 1994 and I have the permissions and restrictions and guilts and opportunities that an American society gives to a white upper middle class woman. I can wear a pantsuit instead of a hoop skirt and go somewhere unaccompanied and earn my own money and have the illusion that I am free. Watch the child before she has been too stamped with culture. She is endlessly curious, for curiosity is her way of learning about the world and thriving in it. Learning is to a child as a long neck is to a giraffe, a way to reach the topmost leaves. Motion, action, a life geared to the pulse beat and the heartbeat, to internal.

[1:05:50] Todd London: Seeking and moving and finding and grasping and knowing all are natural to her. She's highly responsive to stimuli. They now say that a baby one month old can identify its mother's voice out of a cacophony of other voices. The child's products and inventions show an easy connection in a subconscious life through control and intentionality. What we call craft have not yet been achieved. The barrier between outward and inner reality hasn't yet risen to block the imagination or make strict contrasts between what is real and what is merely fantasy. No wonder all those big questions that the theater deals with come so naturally to her. We are here. We face each other. We each have the density of this particular moment.

Our shared cultural past varying according to how old we are, where we've lived, our shared biologic past, which we have in common with everyone everywhere. And we have, last of all, our personal histories, our individual psychobiographies, the narratives of our life. Each of you has a psychobiography, and I'd love to know them, for no one of them is uninteresting. Tell me the story of your life, and I'll tell you mine. It is the opening gambit toward understanding, toward intimacy. I'll go first.

[1:07:51] Todd London: Oh, Angel, we're almost at the end of our time. We're going to have one more reading from Angel, and then maybe Mary and I'll just mingle, and you can ask your questions then. That's great. Oh, we have a little time for questions? Okay, great. So Angel, decide again. I have a snatch of wisdom, a nugget, a pearl even, stumbled upon and shining. We must hang on to our despair. Without despair, everything is hopeless. In the past 20 years, longer for me and a few others, we have made a revolution. And while revolutions can pulse with the joy of change and ride on the back of optimism and imagined good, the energy for them comes from despair. Despair creates anger, and anger creates energy, and energy turns things around.

The dictionary offers up a number of definitions of revolution. I focus on two. A sudden radical or complete change, as in revolution in thought, and a basic reorientation and reorganization, as in revolution in technology. We engaged in both, a revolution in thought and a revolution, not in technology, but in methodology. Fair enough. It was despair that transformed one into the other. Of course, everything started with thought. If the very fabric of our thought had not changed, we would not have been able to change reality. The new perception of theater that came to us had many facets and implications, and each of us emphasized something different. But the basic synapse in our thinking was simple, that theater should stop serving a function of making money, for which it has never been and never will be, and start serving the process of the living, of living, its revelation and shaping, for which theater is uniquely suited, for which it indeed exists. The new thought was that theater should be restored to itself as a form of art.

[1:10:40] Todd London: What is an art form? When I say we wanted our theater to be about art, what exactly do I mean? First of all, I mean that art is something of its own and not something of something else. It is not education. It is not social detriment. It is not about civic pride or better international relations or group therapy. It is not merit goods. It is not goods of any kind. It may serve many worthy ends, and indeed it does, all of the above and more, but it serves these ends tangentially, a spillover from itself. Art is not created for these ends and does not exist for them. It is self-serving and lonely, self-standing and fragile, self-defined and searching. It is what it is. We said we wanted theater as an art form.

When the despair set in, all we had was Broadway and industry built upon one-shotness, mammon-mindedness, crisis and hysteria, lest all be lost on a single throw of the dice. We needed quietude of spirit and continuity, the freedom to fail and still go on working. We had actors stuck in long-run hits and stagnating, or not working at all. Directors and designers with limited outlets, architectural monotony, that is the proscenium arch and nothing else. We set out to create a form for theater that would enable us to insert meaning and beauty into our culture so that people could reach out and touch it simply and directly. Despite hazards and harassments, we have in our various ways done just that.

Our greatest achievement has been to decentralize or make popular, that is, part of the lives of people all over the country, the art of the theater. It is a miracle of sorts, for not only did we have to construct the method to carry our idea, but we had to train an audience to know that they wanted to have what we wanted to give them. And that was not an easy struggle. It still goes on. The dictionary labels another meaning of revolution, obsolete. A winding or curving form or course, twist, bend. It may be obsolete, but it rings a bell. Our course will continue to be a winding one. A great suppleness, as in twist, bend, will be demanded of us for years to come. Sweet are the uses of despair. Without despair, everything is hopeless, and there is still so much to be done. Can we just have another round of applause?

[1:14:00] Todd London: So we'll just see if people have questions.

[1:14:07] Mary B. Robinson: For either book, what surprised you during the process of writing this book? What surprised you?

[1:14:15] Todd London: What surprised? How many different facets of her there were. Partly because so many people had different perspectives on her, but also just going through her papers. She grew as a director, she grew as a human being. So many biographies that I read, they're fascinating until the person becomes successful and then they're boring. And this wasn't a problem because she kept trying new things. And I guess I knew that about her theoretically, but to encounter it with listening to people and reading what she wrote was just very exhilarating and inspiring. I keep using that word.

[1:15:56] Mary B. Robinson: Yeah, I had a few major surprises. One was that she wasn't a plagiarist, both of herself and of other people. Because when you write speeches, you don't necessarily add footnotes in your speeches. So when the speeches become essays, they often contain long passages that you forgot to put quotations in. Even if you cited the book ahead of time. That was something I realized when things didn't sound like Zelda. That's one side. Another was how much she did permeate. Her literary style, her turned mind infected me. And the other thing, which I think you can even hear from pieces that are 30, 40 years old, is that she saw into the future. She looked at the things she was creating and she saw all the problems that we are living with now. And she kept moving. So the pressures and the scope of what she saw and her willingness to not deny it.

[1:16:23] Todd London: You might imagine we could go on for hours.

[1:16:31] Mary B. Robinson: Wonderful, and thank you for coming. It was an incredible conversation full of a lot of things I didn't know. That's one of the benefits of working here is you think that your education ends at the end of college or at graduation. You go into some deep dives into theater and theater history and current theater and you think, OK, I'm done now. I'm just going to go out there and do the thing. But you never stop learning. You never stop learning from artists, from writers, from creators, from actors. And having a job like this at the bookshop, you really don't stop learning. You learn every single day from every guest that comes in, from every artist you meet, from every encounter you have. We learn here just as much as you learn from us.

When people come in looking for monologues or looking for plays, we give that advice. But at the same time, sometimes a person will buy a play that I've never heard of and they'll tell me about it. And now I'm learning and then I'm going to read that play and recommend it to somebody else. It's all community. And that's something we learn from the conversation is the community of theater, the community that we're in. And it's a powerful thing. And that leads us to our next episode, which is also about the power of community, because the next episode is about This Is Not a Dream, a collection of nine plays written by young Ukrainian playwrights whose lives were altered by the invasion of Ukraine.

And it's incredible. And we had playwrights come in and tell their stories. And we will dive into that in the very next episode. Again, I'm always excited to share these with you. I'm very excited to share this one with you as well. So follow us on Instagram at Dramabookshowpodcast. You know what? Comment and give us some interaction on all the things, on the Instagram, on our podcast episodes. Let us know you're out there. It's a really good feeling. Follow our Eventbrite at Dramabookshop. And remember, all the books we talk about can be found here at the bookshop, and so can we, and we will see you at the bookshop!