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[0:00] Mark-Eugene Garcia: Hello, and welcome to the Drama Book Show! My name is Mark-Eugene Garcia. Today, we're sharing a live conversation with playwright, director, screenwriter, and longtime Steppenwolf ensemble member, Eric Simonson. Joined by his brother, writer and journalist, Robert Simonson, Eric discusses his memoir, Between the Lines: Steppenwolf's Seagull and A Reluctant Actor's Journey Back to the Stage. This conversation explores Eric's unexpected return to acting after more than three decades away from the stage, the stage fright that led him to leave acting behind, and the journey that brought him back. Along the way, he reflects on the legendary Chicago theater scene of the 1980s and 90s, his experiences at the Steppenwolf Theater Company, and artists who shaped his career and the challenges of writing a deeply personal memoir. It's a thoughtful, funny, and honest conversation about fear, creativity, memory, and the enduring pull of the theater. Here's Eric Simonson in conversation with Robert Simonson.

[1:17] Robert Simonson: Hi. Oh, my God. Hello, everyone. Some of you told me you were coming in. Others did not, so it's okay. So, Robert, you want to tell them a little bit about yourself?

[1:32] Robert Simonson: Yeah, I'll tell you a little bit about myself. So, we're both members of the same family and a lot of people in the family are in the theater. My mother was a drama and music high school teacher. And as a result, Eric became an actor, director, and writer. My older sister is a costume designer. And I, for a while, was a theater writer and journalist and critic. I wrote for the New York Times and the Village Voice and Time Out New York. And I was the editor of Playbill Online for about, I don't know, about 15 years. I now write about cocktails, which may seem strange, but it's not because theater and bars are, it's all just theater. Correct? All right. So, that's me. But we're here to talk about Eric, my brother, who has written this lovely memoir.

Now, the spark of the story of the memoir, has anyone read it yet? Okay. Is stage fright. My brother took a role in a production at Steppenwolf Theater Company recently in a Chekhov play. And it was his first role in how many years?

[2:43] Eric Simonson: 35 years.

[2:53] Robert Simonson: And my family, we follow each other's careers fairly closely. But it was not until I read the book that I realized his last role before that was in the Broadway production of The Grapes of Wrath back in 1990, a Tony Award-winning play. And it was not until I read the memoir that I understood why that was his last role. It was because during that production, he developed stage fright for the first time in his life. And so, he decided never to act again. So, Eric, can you talk about that a bit? I imagine we have some theater people in the audience. Do you think? Yes. We can imagine what stage fright is like, but what is it really like? What does it feel like? How does it feel inside? How does it happen?

[3:35] Eric Simonson: There's a long answer to that. And what I find interesting is that since I've written this book and thought about stage fright for quite a while now, I've come across so many actors who have admitted to having stage fright that I never would have imagined to have stage fright. And a lot of working actors who still perform, who still have stage fright. And it's amazing to me that overcoming that became my obsession with taking on this role when I took it on. Just for context for those of you who haven't read the book, I'm in the ensemble of Steppenwolf Theater. I work there mainly as a writer and director. The way I was introduced to the ensemble was I started out as an actor. I did Grapes of Wrath a long time ago.

It was the last time I was on stage, but I was directing at the same time. Steppenwolf asked me to be a director in their ensemble, and I forgot about acting at that point and never looked back. Cut to 2022, Steppenwolf Theater is opening a brand new multi-million dollar theater space, and the first show is going to be Seagull. And they want as much ensemble participation as possible. So they call me up and they offer me a role out of the blue to play Dr. Doerr. Not a big role, but still I have to learn lines. One time the artistic directors there asked me if I would ever consider acting again. I said, yeah, if you can find me a role that has no lines, I will happily go back on stage again. But anyway, they offered me this role and I saw it as a challenge.

I also hadn't been back to Steppenwolf in a while. We had a bunch of new ensemble members I wanted to get to know, and that seemed like it might be a really good way to get to know these artists. And that actually worked out really well. I did make a lot of new friends and collaborators during that time. But the other part of it was, am I brave enough to confront this fear that I had been, that had been hibernating in me for the last 35 years? So that's what the book is. And I was going to read part of it. I wonder if I should read the preface because that sort of explains it, but we can get to that later. Anyway, there will be a reading later.

[5:55] Robert Simonson: It's a memoir. You've written many different kinds of things at this point. You've written plays and libretti and screenplays and teleplays. And now this is your first memoir. It's a genre that's trendy at this point. It used to be that a writer would, or a performer, would have an entire career and then at the end of it consider writing a memoir. These days often a memoir is the first book that people write. I was reading an interview with a very prominent food writer in town. And that person was asked, when are you going to write a book? And the response was, don't want to write a cookbook. I think I'd like to start with a memoir. And I'm just thinking, you're 30, or was I? Can you talk about the particular challenges and skills that are needed to write a memoir? What is needed for that? And when does a person decide, yes, I can write a memoir?

[7:05] Eric Simonson: I don't know. I don't know if I, there was just something about, I'll just tell you what the preface says. I'd been talking at this lecture, or I was invited to talk at my university, Lawrence University in Wisconsin, and I was talking about writing for television. That was mainly what my talk was about. But I mentioned offhand that I just acted in this play at Steppenwolf. Then when I asked for questions at the end of the session, everyone wanted to ask me questions about acting. They couldn't care less about writing or television. And I thought, well, this is interesting. And then it kept on coming up in conversation. If I mentioned that I had been on the stage, people wanted to know what that was like.

So I started writing about it with the intention of maybe making it an article or maybe making a social media post or something. But as I was writing about it, I started remembering things about coming up through the ranks of Chicago theater, where I started and where I learned how to do theater. And there were all these stories and people that I had encountered, and it became therapeutic and cathartic to just remember these things. And for my own self, really part of overcoming stage fright was rediscovering the joy of acting, which I realized that I had at one time and that I had forgotten about. And it's really hard to crash through that wall of fear to get to the place where you're on stage and really nothing else matters except what's going on between the artists on stage and that sort of spark of energy that happens and then goes out to the audience.

And I think that is sort of at the essence. I'm very devoted to my company, Steppenwolf in Chicago. It's got a particular style of acting, and I think that really is at the heart of it. It's what we strive for is what's happening between us and then what's happening between us and then the audience. So I don't know if the memoir was necessary, but it really helped me articulate what I wanted for myself in art. And that went beyond acting. It went to directing and how I write for an actor. I feel like I was a pretty crappy writer until I understood that on writing plays, I really had to put myself in the shoes of the actor in order to become a good writer. And that also went back to my experience with acting in Chekhov.

The other reason to do this play was I've never acted in a Chekhov play. I never directed a Chekhov play. It scares the shit out of me. I don't know. I still don't really understand how his plays work or how they have lasted so long. But I did understand some things about him and got closer to why it is that actors are drawn to him and what it is about his writing that really propelled the art of writing a play forward.

[10:24] Robert Simonson: You cover a lot of ground in the book. It begins when you're a young man. It tells of the decision you made to move to Chicago after college. It talks about your salad days and moving up in the Chicago theater world in the 80s and 90s and some stories from beyond. What was the process like in deciding what to put in and what stories to leave out?

[10:50] Eric Simonson: It was a stream, sort of a stream of consciousness and not. There were some stories that I knew I wanted to tell. And it really was back and forth between chronologically getting the offer to act the part and then that sparking a memory about starting out as an actor and my big plan about what I was going to do and how I was going to make it in this business. And then going back again to that journey of becoming an actor again. So back and forth. And I didn't really know what stories I was going to tell until I started writing. It really was one chapter after another. One of the things that I love about the book, for anybody out there who isn't terribly familiar with what the Chicago theater scene was like in the 80s and 90s, when it was arguably the most exciting theater scene in the United States, this would be a good book to turn to, to get a kind of a picture of that, a first-person picture of that. You capture a lot of that energy, a lot of that excitement where anything seemed to be possible and you could.

[12:01] Eric Simonson: Put together a production for a couple hundred dollars and you would end up with these great reviews and people's careers would begin. Can you talk a little bit about what that was like? What that theater atmosphere was like and how it was different from what someone might experience today? I don't know how it is in Chicago today because I don't live there and I don't do theater in Chicago. I haven't for a long time, but I do have a sense that the thing that would set that sort of period apart—and we're talking from about 1980 to 1995—so Steppenwolf Theater started in 1976. John Malkovich and Gary Sinise did I think True West in 1981 or 2. Baum and Gilead was 1980. So they just blew up and then there was Wisdom Bridge and there was Remains Theater and there was the Organic Theater.

All these things were happening at once. What I say is that there were really great things that happened in Chicago before and after that period, but it was never that new. It was never that sort of thing that was happening at that freshness at any time, I think. And what happened was you had a bunch of artists who came there who were willing to work for nothing and put on a show on a shoestring, and you had the major critic Richard Christensen and then Glenna Sykes, I think, and later on Hedy Weiss. They would come out and they would see you. They didn't care if you were an equity house. They didn't care if you were a non-equity house, and we're talking about hundreds of storefronts all over the place.

They would come and they'd give you prime real estate in the Chicago Tribune, and if your show got their good graces, people came and saw you and you built from there. You were allowed to go out and create. It really was like the Mickey Rooney, Judy Garland, let's go put on a show, and everyone was doing it all over the place. So it was exciting in that regard, and then we had our watering holes. We had the various bars that we all hung out at, and it was hard to tell the difference between—and probably a lot of equity actors in here, no disparagement—but sometimes it was really hard to tell the difference between an equity actor and a non-equity actor because you really got to practice your craft.

You could do non-equity actors who were resisting going equity because they wanted to remain doing shows. There are only like 12 equity houses in Chicago, so if you went equity, you couldn't act in the immediate theater. Immediate I think was equity, but Lifeline Theater, you couldn't act at Alliance, you couldn't act at all these little theater companies that wouldn't allow equity actors. I guess what I'm saying is it was really like a freewheeling time. It was like the wild west out there, and we felt like we had nothing to lose. Everyone felt like they had absolutely nothing to lose, and that's just a different scene. New York had that too. It was a different vibe, and I think that New York was doing that off-Broadway in the 20s and 30s, and this was Chicago's 20s and 30s. This is a time when everything was new.

[15:25] Eric Simonson: Yeah, a lot of careers that we all know today got started there in your own company. People like John Malkovich and Joan Allen and John Mahoney. One of the people that figure prominently in one section of your book is the playwright Scott McPherson. He wrote an off-Broadway play called Marvin's Room, which was later turned into a movie and it got him a lot of attention. Sadly, his life ended shortly after that. He was a very young man. You worked with him early on. You directed a play of his, I believe, at Lifeline called Till the Fat Lady Sings and then continued to work with him further, I believe, on Marvin's Room. It's a really interesting example of somebody who just started out as an actor, as I believe Scott McPherson. Can you talk about that relationship?

[16:11] Eric Simonson: I'm glad you bring that up because he's a guy. He's one of many people, very interesting, talented people that I met in Chicago. What I do in this book sometimes is I try to track how did this happen? How did I get here? How did I get to be in The Grapes of Wrath on Broadway when I didn't know what the fuck I was doing? I track it all the way back, and I can usually go right to the source. If this didn't happen, then this wouldn't have happened, then this wouldn't have happened. I wouldn't have gotten there. Scott is one of those stories in the book. He was a guy that I met through a friend of mine, Larry Sloan, who both Scott and Larry died of AIDS at very young ages. Larry introduced me to Scott as an actor, and I befriended Scott, and I would see him every now and then.

We went to the same gym, so we were walking away from the gym one day, and Scott mentioned he had written a play. I said, I'm looking for a play to direct. My big plan in Chicago was I'm going to go there, and I'm not an actor, but I'm going to audition for things, and then maybe I'll get cast in something, and then maybe then I can meet people, and they'll ask me to direct their plays. It was a dumb plan, but it worked.

[17:36] Eric Simonson: Anyway, I was looking for a play to direct, and I was really interested in a new play, so Scott gave me this play called Till the Fat Lady Sings, which was really one of those plays that you read a play that you really thought was funny, and you couldn't stop laughing out loud. That was one of those plays. It's hilarious. It was raw. It was messy, but it was clear that Scott had this talent. The other thing that he did for me as a person, as a friend, was he demystified the craft of playwriting. What I learned from Scott was that plays aren't these magical things that come down from the sky and you have to be touched in a very perfect way by God in order to write a play. No, this is a guy who was doing the same waiting job that I was doing, and he'd go home and he'd write some jokes on a piece of paper, and then we'd read it, and it would come to life.

He was more than anybody a big inspiration or a breakthrough in terms of, I think that maybe I can do this. I'm forever grateful to him for that. We did Till the Fat Lady Sings at Lifeline. They let me direct it again. The plan worked. It was a big hit. Then I cast Scott in a play, a production of The Normal Heart. We continued our relationship, collaboration that way. Then he mentioned, we went out to a coffee shop on the corner of Belmont on Broadway, and we thought we'd plan our futures. We're young punks trying to get work in theater and not getting work. Working in theater, but not getting paid for it. Scott's response was, hey, you know what? Why don't we write film scripts? As long as we're banging our head against a brick wall, we might as well bang it against a really big one.

When I said, okay, we started talking about what films we wanted to write. As we were talking about these films, he said, I have a couple of plays too. We should work on those. I said, what are the plays? He told me the stories. The second play that he told me the story of was Marvin's Room. Immediately I knew that was what we needed to work on next. We did. He would write scenes. He'd come over to my apartment. Oops. The two of us would read all the parts. He's one of these people in Chicago that had he lived, I think he would have been running Hollywood by now. He's just really a genius writer, sensitive, smart, funny as I'll get out. He's one of my characters in the book.

[20:21] Eric Simonson: Reading the book for the first time, it occurred to me that I was lucky enough when I went to school at Northwestern University, just north of Chicago in the 80s. I often took the L down to see plays at the early versions of Wisdom Bridge and Steppenwolf and Remains and Lifeline, all these great theaters. I got to see all these wonderful actors and directors, see their careers start to rise. That all came washing back as I read the book. It occurred to me that you were like a Zelig type character. You seem to have run into or worked with every notable Chicago figure in the 1980s. Have you heard back from any of those people since the book came out?

[21:10] Eric Simonson: Terry Kinney. One of the founders of Steppenwolf. Yeah. He was very supportive of the book and gave me a lot of insight early on as to what stories he thought I should tell and not. Who else?

[21:25] David Rigano: What about the other founders, Gary Sinise and Jeff Perry?

[21:28] Eric Simonson: I don't know if Jeff has read it. Gary, probably not. I don't think. Fran Ginen read it. He's in the ensemble. John Hill has read it.

[21:39] David Rigano: Anybody you acted with in Grapes of Wrath?

[21:42] Eric Simonson: Who's read it? I couldn't tell you. Terry Kinney.

[21:47] David Rigano: Yeah. Was there anybody who said either, thank you for writing this all down, you captured it perfectly, or said that wasn't how it was at all?

[22:01] Eric Simonson: I've gotten some thank yous, and the people who don't like the book haven't said anything. I don't know. I feel grateful for the feedback that I've gotten from people. I think that there should be—Terry's response was, because Gary had written a book about—I forget what it's called, but it's about his experience founding Steppenwolf, being a kid in Highland Park, Illinois, founding Steppenwolf, going out to Hollywood, being on Broadway, but also eventually becoming this supporter of veterans' needs, which is really his life now. That's what his focus is. Terry's response to the book was, yeah, let's all write books. That's what I want to see. I want to see everybody in Chicago or New York, anybody, write a book so we have this as people's history.

It's an oral history. I tried to write it as I speak. It's meant to be just that, a document of my experience, but if there are several different voices coming from different directions, I think anybody who's interested would get a really good picture of what it was like.

[23:24] Eric Simonson: That's true. Theater, as we know, it's an ephemeral art. It's written on the sand. Really, I learned this as a theater critic. There were only two written sources for understanding the productions of the past that you had not read. One were the reviews by the critics, would tell you what they saw, and the other were memoirs by artists. That's how you could piece together that history. Speaking of everyone should write more books, now this memoir, this experience has led you to, you're going to write more memoirs, aren't you?

[23:55] Eric Simonson: I think I will, yeah. You want to talk about, you have two planned. Yeah, the one is I direct a lot of operas.

[24:02] Eric Simonson: So I thought I'd write about that world. Whenever I go to opera, I say I'm visiting Planet Opera because it's... I don't know if anyone here has worked in opera, but it really is a world in and of itself. And it's kind of hard to explain to opera people what theater is and vice versa. And there are very few people who kind of work in both worlds. So that might be interesting. And that sort of tells the story of some operas I've developed. But it also goes back to my personal life and circumstances that happened in my life that relate to those operas at the same time. And that one is called The End of Opera. And the other one is called From the Page to the Cage, which is my experiences as a writer in Hollywood, which can be kind of funny, tragically funny.

One of the productions that you directed, not early on, but in the mid part of your early directing career, was the Chicago premiere of Tony Kushner's Slavs at Steppenwolf. And there's a great story in the book from that. And would you mind, you're going to read a part of that for us?

[25:08] Eric Simonson: Yeah, yeah. I already told you about the preface, so we'll skip that. This is... I'll start right here, just to set it up. The chap was talking about my challenge with remembering my lines. My very few lines as Dr. Dorn. Dr. Dorn is not a huge part. And I think, actually, that was one of the problems with Grapes of Wrath, is that I played six different characters, and each character had one line. So it was a lot of pressure on me not to screw up. If you go out there and your job is only to deliver one line and you screw that up, you just don't want to be that guy. So anyway, Dr. Dorn, I've got these lines, and I've got different techniques with how to remember the lines. And a lot of actors know these techniques.

One is, you put the first letter of each word down in a sequence, and you remember the letters. And that helps you remember the line. Does that make any sense to anybody? Because the other was to put it on a tape, a recording, and to constantly remember it that way. And I won't tell you how I eventually cracked the code, because that's the climax of the book. But anyway, I'm trying to remember lines. And as I'm remembering them, I'm remembering this story. One of my fears comes from this story that I had when, as Robert said, I was directing the second only production of Tony Kushner's Slavs at Steppenwolf Theater. And I was looking for... The play required, I think, five actors from the ages of 40 to 90, all male.

And Tony Kushner told me later on he was never going to write a play like that, because it was impossible to find actors who could remember their lines. Anyway, I'm in the hunt for an older actor who can remember lines.

[27:02] Eric Simonson: One of these actors is a father of a friend of mine who had a day job as an ad executive in a downtown Chicago firm. The man, let's call him Bob, was non-union, but that didn't matter. In Chicago, the acting pool was so vibrant and strong that it was often hard to tell the amateurs from the pros. Bob was a man who acted as a hobby, but his talents were nothing short of inspirational. He was a natural. Coming to theater at a late age, he tried out for a play on Adair and won the part. After success in some small, below-the-radar productions, he started going, getting offers from directors at more prominent equity houses around the city. But then tragedy struck, in a moment when the planets aligned in a way that seemed to plot against an unsuspecting mortal.

On the opening night of a new play at Northlight Theater, waiting in the wings, on hearing his cue, Bob was instantly, inexplicably overcome with fear. And he stood there, stock still, refusing to go on. No matter of coaxing from stage management could budge him, and the actors on stage vamped and waited, helpless. Trapped and desperate, Bob chose the only reasonable option he thought available. He turned heel, bolted, and left the theater. He hoofed across the parking lot, folded himself into his car, and sped off, never to return. This event, a case study of an actor's nightmare, spread through the Chicago theater community like wildfire. Everyone talked about it, because it's a pretty damn good story.

But also, because it took away from the anxiety we all feel about failing miserably in public, Bob became the sacrificial lamb of sorts, a Tessie Hutchinson of our little colloquial lottery, the human sacrifice that allowed the rest of us to live our theatrical lives free from worry. I knew Bob and his family, and I felt for them. About the time I was casting Slavs and beating the bushes for old farts to play Russian apparatchiks, I thought of Bob. I heard he had turned his full attention back to hustling ad accounts. But it'd been a few years since the nightmare event at Northlight, and I wonder if he might be ready to give acting another shot. And doesn't everyone deserve a second chance? So I called Bob, and I asked if he'd be interested in getting back on the boards.

He didn't skip a beat. Yes, came the quick reply. But could I send him the script? I sent him the play, and the very next day, he called and accepted, telling me it would be an honor to be a part of this production. I was elated. In that instant, I imagined Bob's performance. The Chicago Community Theater would all come out to see him. They'd be wowed by his performance and amazed at the improbable comeback an actor kicks stage fright's ass.

[30:24] Eric Simonson: His humiliating exit from the theater would be vindicated after a singularly triumphant performance in a brand new play by America's preeminent playwright. The first day of rehearsal, Bob came prepared. He was completely off book, word perfect. There was not a trace of hesitation reciting his lines around the table. The cast was blown away, intimidated even, by his memorization prowess. A few of the older actors ragged him for being such a Pollyanna. All the same, Bob's preparation cowed everyone else into working that much harder. Then, a very strange thing happened. As rehearsals proceeded, Bob showed signs of waning confidence. He would forget a word here or there and get knocked off track.

Another day, an entire line would go out the window, then a passage. The other actors, the staff, and I watched in worried amazement as he proceeded to, day by day, forget every single word. We reached the run-through stage, and Bob continued to falter. By then, it had become clear that this was not just some sort of cognitive degeneration or dementia or whatever. We had seen Bob word perfect. He had conquered forgetfulness. He was free and clear. And then he lost it. He went down a rabbit hole of anxiety from which he seemed never unable to return. During rehearsals, when he was not on stage, I would send him away with a production assistant to go over lines. But Bob didn't need time. He needed a psychiatrist.

[32:02] Eric Simonson: Previews proved worse. Mary Ann Mayberry, who was Bob's main scene partner, she played a sadomasochistic punk rocker to Bob's aging bureaucrat, was understanding but to a point. And eventually, her patience ran out. She appealed to me privately. We're dying up there, she told me. It's just me and him on stage, and every look in his eyes is sheer terror. Forget about delivering a solid performance. She was just trying to get through the goddamn scene without stopping the show dead in its tracks. Then, mid-previews, Tony Kushner came out from New York to check on our progress. He had a stake in the show. It was only the second production of the play and the last stop before a New York premiere.

I greeted Tony in the lobby before the performance and coolly chatted him up. I think at that time I was in denial, hoping against hope that he and the audience might appreciate Bob's long pauses between lines and rather slipshod delivery as a character choice meant to reflect the way some people actually talk. No such luck. That night, Bob's performance was once again disastrous. Whole sections went missing. Lines were ditched and brutally paraphrased. Bob's fear was palpable. Mary Ann was a trooper, but in the end, she was, unfortunately, forced to share the humiliation of an actor trying to salvage a scene doomed to fail. After the performance, I looked around for Tony. He was nowhere to be found.

The house manager mentioned something about seeing him slip in the administration offices just off the lobby. I went into the darkened room and searched, eventually finding him at my desk, shielded from the rest of the office by a couple cubicle partitions. His head was buried between his arms, hands clasped over his head, fingers laced together like a Chinese finger trap. I may be mistaken, but I think he might have been rocking back and forth in the manner of Dustin Hoffman's Rain Man. In that instant, I knew it was clear. Bob had to go. I'd never fired an actor before. It was inconceivable that I would ever do such a thing. It went against my convictions of sticking with the team and never giving up. But there were other people to take into account, people like Mary Ann, helpless on stage, who needed an assist.

[34:16] Eric Simonson: The next morning, I called Bob and asked him to meet me before rehearsal. He agreed without asking why, though I guess he probably knew. Our meeting was uncomfortable, but short and to the point. I told him we needed to make a change. His line issues were getting in the way of presenting the play Tony had written, and that wasn't fair to him or anyone else. All the while I was talking, Bob nodded in agreement. This was a conversation that needed to happen, but it was clear he wanted to get it over with as soon as possible. When I finished, Bob smiled and stood up. He shook my hand and wished me luck. There was not a tinge of anger or animosity in his expression or manner. Mostly, he looked relieved.

And I saw him for who he was, a 65-year-old ad exec who picked up the gauntlet of a second chance and failed. Acting was not his world. Perhaps it never was. Perhaps, in the days when audiences marveled at his performances, he was merely executing a neat trick. Maybe his talent was not a talent at all, but an illusion. Or maybe not. No one can take away the moments he gave to the audience. His past on-target performances were as real as the memories of them that people nurtured. Those existed. They were real. They are real. Before he left, Bob asked me to pass along his regards to the rest of the cast and tell them that he was sorry he couldn't say goodbye in person. Then he turned and left. Just like I imagined, he had turned and left Northlight Theatre that night a few years before.

[36:04] Eric Simonson: And I never saw Bob again. Stage fright once, shame on you. Stage fright twice, you never get a third shot, do you? So, this was at the front of my brain as I prepared for Seagull. Were Bob's issues really purely psychological? Who can say? All I knew was that I didn't want the same fate. I'd come close to disaster with grapes, but steered clear of it. What about now? Had I set myself up for failure? Maybe in the end, I'd be forced to hang it all up. Everything. Just like Bob.

[36:53] Eric Simonson: Thank you. We're now going to take a few questions. Anyone have a question for Eric?

[36:57] Audience Member: Hi, Eric. How are you? I've known Eric a long time. In fact, Eric gave me my equity card in 1996. And I publicly thanked him. I thanked him personally. Eric, I want to say a couple of things, and then I want to ask you a question. The book reminded me of Anthony Scheer's Year of the King, because you have so many great sketches in it. You're a really talented artist in that regard as well. I just want to say that for people who haven't read it. It's really brilliant. And I love at the end of it, you talk about how there are different ways people come backstage to greet you after a play, and how they sometimes clearly are saying things that they don't really mean or whatever. And as an actor, I think that's the very first time anyone's ever been honest about that experience.

And I applaud you for that, because it's brilliant and it's true. I want to ask you about your process, because it seems to me there's an irony in that you struggled with learning lines, but you remember these details so well through the process of doing the play. Is that in part due to keeping a very specific journal? I think about trying to write about a play that I've done, and I just feel like I couldn't come up with a quarter of the rich detail that you have here. I mean, how did you do that? So the question is, how do I remember the details, but yet I forget my lines? I guess the first part of the question is, how did you write the book, talking in such great detail about things that happened 10, 20, 30 years ago, including the recent production at Steppenwolf?

But it's just a rich history. I'm just curious, is it based on going back to journals? Is it based on just having a great memory for the stuff? I assume that everyone has core memories, and we don't share all the same core memories. You could remember, there's that great moment in Citizen Kane, where his old friend is an old man, he's talking about how he remembers a lady with a parasol standing on the Staten Island Ferry, and it was 50 years ago, but he remembers it just like yesterday. So I think I draw from those core memories. But I would also say that probably as a writer, I'm observing a lot. So I think that some details that I remember, other people wouldn't remember. And I forget a lot too. People tell me things about myself that I could swear were another person, but I believe them. You did this. I did? Okay.

[40:12] Audience Member: I was in Chicago briefly in the 90s when I made it, and you have captured the time period and that energy of the city. And as Robert said, it was a special time, and the idea that everybody had nothing to lose is exactly, I think, why it felt so alive and so vibrant. And it is a piece of history that you put down, and it's really important, and thank you for that.

[40:49] Eric Simonson: Oh, thanks, Tom. I appreciate it. I believe the lady back there had a question.

[40:55] Audience Member: Hi, how are you doing? So I'm curious, is Bob your real name?

[41:03] Eric Simonson: Oh, yeah, it's not his real name. So yeah, Bob has passed away, so no, he is not.

[41:16] Audience Member: Oh, thank you. Thanks so much. Thanks. And I think that story in particular, I love that story, one of my favorites in the book, but it captured what that world was. Like you said, there were equity next to non-equity, professionals, non-professionals. Can anyone imagine a theater in the New York theater right now where there's some ad exec that lacks every now and then off Broadway? It's just his hobby, and he's really good at it. Any other questions? Right there.

[41:43] Audience Member: Hi. Hi. So I was introduced to Eric who was writing a little bit of a practice that's like very collaboration with Ladysmith, and some other scripts of yours that I've read. And I'm just curious when you write, when you write something like this that feels super emotional and kind of like narratively chronological, versus when your brain gets to expand and like do those super fantastic scripts that you do, do you work differently when you are working on either one of those things? Like was this a different writing process than working on Lindy Ray was?

[42:29] Eric Simonson: Yeah, yeah, definitely. But ultimately, I think when I'm writing fictional characters, and I'm like trying to inhabit them. And I think that the characters that I inhabit have a lot of, are a lot like me. So I draw from my own experience to write the character. So yeah, it's definitely different because you're not doing a back and forth. And it's harder to, it's harder to fill a page when you don't get any spaces in between dialogue.

[43:01] Audience Member: Oh, thank you. But I think that it's a different muscle you're using, but not as different as you might think. I think we have time for one more question. Anybody? Right there.

[43:32] Audience Member: Are you asking what it feels like when you're in the grips of stage fright?

[43:37] Eric Simonson: It feels like you're tumbling in your mind. It feels like you're going, you're doing backwards somersaults, and you've lost all sense of where you are in the world. There are different kinds, it's a fear that you feel before you go on stage. But once you get on stage, you kind of get through it because of muscle memory or because your actors are helping you through it. But there's that time on stage when it's all you and you forget, you go up on your lines and there's nothing. And you're just looking for some, it's fear. It's really, it's ultimately perpetual fear. And it's the worst kind because it's everybody's nightmare is failing in public.

[44:33] Eric Simonson: We didn't talk about it, but I think it's pretty well known that Terry's decided he's never going to be on the stage again. And it happened to him. Lawrence Olivier had stage fright. He used to play Othello and he used to make his Iago stand right off stage during his scenes when Iago was not on stage. Iago hated him for it. But it was like the way that he got through it. And then he overcame it. The way that I, it was kind of like a process of trying to find anything that I could hang on to to get rid of this stage fright. And eventually, and you can't really, like I said earlier, you can't really understand the art of acting until you've overcome that. It's kind of like you can't enjoy sailing until you build the boat. If you're sailing and you're worrying about the leaks and whether the boat's going to sink, you can't enjoy sailing. So you have to just like, you have to make it seaworthy and then you can be a sailor to extend the metaphor.

[45:36] Eric Simonson: I said never, but after I did it, I thought I'm done with that. I wouldn't, I don't know. I don't know. I might. I might. There's that part out there that has no lines, I'm sure of it. I think there are several in Beckett.

[46:01] Audience Member: Is the stage fright only connected to the lines? In other words, is there also just a fear of being looked at in a way? Or being that public person in front of everybody? Or is it only about the lines?

[46:18] Eric Simonson: It's not about the lines, really. I think it is more about just standing outside yourself and not understanding that what you're doing is something more than just mimicking another person. Just pretend, I'm pretending to be another person. That's one thing, but that's the shortest distance from here to fear is just pretending. I think you have to inhabit it and you have to find the joy in it. You have to find the joy in ensemble. You have to find the joy in that this is nothing, this is something beyond a craft. This is an art to it. Once you find the art to it, I think that you kind of lose yourself. If you can lose yourself, like Eminem said, lose yourself.

[47:00] Eric Simonson: And we are back. You've been listening to the Drama Book Show Podcast. Our thanks to Eric Simonson and Robert Simonson for joining us to discuss Between the Lines, Steppenwolf's Seagull and a Reluctant Actor's Journey Back to the Stage, and for sharing stories from a remarkable life in the theater. Our next episode will cover Richard Holder's book, Acting Out, How a Prison Theater Workshop Broke Free, and will feature performances from Acting Out, a company of formerly incarcerated artists continuing the work they began behind prison walls. Remember to follow us on Instagram at Drama Book Show Podcast. Follow us on Eventbrite at Drama Book Shop. And remember, all the books we talk about can be found here at the Drama Book Shop, and so can we, and we will see you at the bookshop!