This transcript was automatically generated and might contain errors.

[0:15] Mark-Eugene Garcia: Hello and welcome to The Drama Book Show.

[0:17] David Rigano: My name is David Rigano.

[0:18] Dylan Glick: And my name is Dylan Glick.

[0:21] Mark-Eugene Garcia: Yay, we're all here.

[0:22] David Rigano: Week three.

[0:23] Dylan Glick: Exactly.

[0:24] Mark-Eugene Garcia: The boys are back.

[0:26] David Rigano: It's all about family.

[0:29] Mark-Eugene Garcia: I have to see it tomorrow.

[0:31] Dylan Glick: Exactly.

[0:32] Mark-Eugene Garcia: I have a question for both of you. How do we feel about immersive theater?

[0:37] David Rigano: I think a lot of what got me into theater in the first place is like I'm a big theme park guy. And so immersive storytelling has always been like something that I've loved. So immersive theater is, yeah, love it.

[0:49] Dylan Glick: I remember we saw Frat in Chicago when we were doing Facing East.

[0:55] Mark-Eugene Garcia: Same real experience with immersive theater.

[0:58] Dylan Glick: And what was that?

[1:00] Mark-Eugene Garcia: 2011?

[1:01] Dylan Glick: Something like that.

[1:02] Mark-Eugene Garcia: And it's the same creators of Five Lesbians and a Quiche.

[1:04] David Rigano: Yeah.

[1:05] Mark-Eugene Garcia: And yeah, and we saw it because the theater company who produced that was producing our musical for Facing East.

[1:12] Dylan Glick: Which is not immersive.

[1:13] Mark-Eugene Garcia: Which is not immersive.

[1:15] Dylan Glick: But I'm just gonna very serious show.

[1:19] Mark-Eugene Garcia: I remember seeing Frat and going, I have to do something like this.

[1:25] David Rigano: Yes.

[1:26] Mark-Eugene Garcia: And four years later, a friend of mine, Nancy Holson, was general managing a show called Wild Women of Planet Wongo.

[1:37] Dylan Glick: And she brought me in to interview to direct, and it was gonna be an immersive show.

[1:42] Mark-Eugene Garcia: And I just thought back to Frat and I said, I need it has to be me.

[1:42] Dylan Glick: It has to be me.

[1:48] Mark-Eugene Garcia: And I went in and really tried to sell myself on why I was the right.

[1:54] David Rigano: Even though I had never done anything immersive, I had to be the one to direct this musical.

[1:59] Mark-Eugene Garcia: And I said, I know everything that there is to know about putting on musicals, and I need to do immersive theater.

[2:07] David Rigano: And I kept citing Frat.

[2:08] Mark-Eugene Garcia: I went, This show that I saw, and they did this, and this is how we could do it, but on a different planet. And here's how you get characters to let the actors, the audience, know where the actors get, and all of this stuff.

[2:20] David Rigano: And that's what my focus was.

[2:22] Mark-Eugene Garcia: And apparently the thing that really sold me, because this was like a 1960s B movie style immersive musical, was that I got all the 1960s references.

[2:34] Dylan Glick: Nice.

[2:34] Mark-Eugene Garcia: And that was the thing. And like for all of me, like sweating, trying to be like, hire me because I'm gonna make it as immersive as it possibly.

[2:43] David Rigano: He was like, Oh, this guy gets the 60s. All right, you're in.

[2:46] Mark-Eugene Garcia: And this was the writer of that.

[2:48] David Rigano: Dave Ogren.

[2:48] Mark-Eugene Garcia: Dave Ogren, who also wrote Hell Hole Honeys, which I first listened to.

[2:53] Dylan Glick: It's so good.

[2:53] Mark-Eugene Garcia: And has one of my favorite lyrics in the world.

[2:56] Dylan Glick: Uh-huh.

[2:57] Mark-Eugene Garcia: Where it's a song called Bitches and Hoes.

[2:58] Dylan Glick: And I have not heard this song in like 10-15 years.

[3:00] Mark-Eugene Garcia: I just remember it was of this show.

[3:02] Dylan Glick: I've never heard of it.

[3:03] Mark-Eugene Garcia: Oh, it used to be on his MySpace.

[3:05] Dylan Glick: Uh-huh.

[3:06] Mark-Eugene Garcia: Um that's MySpace.

[3:09] David Rigano: You weren't born yet, Dylan.

[3:11] Mark-Eugene Garcia: But there was a line where these bitches and hoes from a prison are from the Hell Hole Honeys are fighting, and one of them says something, and you better hear it.

[3:22] Dylan Glick: Stick a Q tip in the ear and clear it.

[3:26] Mark-Eugene Garcia: Yes.

[3:27] Dylan Glick: It was such a good idea.

[3:28] Mark-Eugene Garcia: And I wonder Dave does his own lyrics sometimes, but he also writes music to other people's lyrics, so I don't know.

[3:34] Mark-Eugene Garcia: But also, just to give you an idea of who this individual is, Hell Hole Honeys, Wild Women of Planet Wongo.

[3:41] David Rigano: And he had a show at the fringe called The Legend of Julie Tamor or The Show That Killed Everyone.

[3:48] Dylan Glick: Yes, I heard about that one too.

[3:50] Mark-Eugene Garcia: That was either at Fring or Nymph.

[3:51] David Rigano: I think it was at Fringe.

[3:53] Mark-Eugene Garcia: So that's the kind of artistic mind we're dealing with.

[3:57] Mark-Eugene Garcia: And actually, Dave, if you're listening, I owe you a pardon me.

[3:57] Mark-Eugene Garcia: I owe you a text. There is a property that he told me back before the pandemic times he wanted to do as a musical, and I recently looked at it, and I'm not gonna say what it is.

[4:18] Mark-Eugene Garcia: But I have recently looked at this property, and I'm like, if he hasn't started this, I'll write this with him.

[4:22] Mark-Eugene Garcia: Dave, maybe we'll collaborate again soon.

[4:25] David Rigano: That's making connections.

[4:26] Mark-Eugene Garcia: But I do want to talk about this conversation I had this morning because I got to talk to Mara Lieberman, who runs the Bated Breath Theater Company, and they are doing an immersive production called Dirty Books.

[4:39] Dylan Glick: Yeah.

[4:39] Mark-Eugene Garcia: Now we have had that display.

[4:41] David Rigano: Yeah, I love so I really want to see this.

[4:44] Mark-Eugene Garcia: Because of it also because I love dirty books.

[4:46] Dylan Glick: I didn't even know it was immersive.

[4:49] Mark-Eugene Garcia: Aren't they all?

[4:50] David Rigano: But because of the title, it's been appearing on my algorithm for quite some time.

[4:55] Mark-Eugene Garcia: Yes, yeah.

[4:56] David Rigano: When the display went up, I was like, Oh, I had seen it.

[4:58] Mark-Eugene Garcia: I've seen this, yeah.

[4:59] David Rigano: I think that I already follow them on Instagram because I was like, I don't know who you are, but clearly I must.

[5:07] Mark-Eugene Garcia: The other reason that it's been appearing on our Instagram for some time is because it's been extended four times.

[5:13] Dylan Glick: Good for them.

[5:14] Mark-Eugene Garcia: Yes, it opened, I believe, in November.

[5:17] David Rigano: There's a lot of demand for dirty books these days.

[5:19] Mark-Eugene Garcia: There truly is. It's really exciting because it's not it's a piece that they all get together and end up creating this story, this erotic story within boundaries.

[5:29] David Rigano: And I will let her explain those boundaries because it was really cool.

[5:32] Dylan Glick: Can I ask you?

[5:34] Mark-Eugene Garcia: And I and maybe you talked about this, and maybe this will come out in the interview, and maybe you're I don't know.

[5:40] Dylan Glick: Is it the kind of immersive where it's like a sleep no more where you follow them?

[5:46] Mark-Eugene Garcia: Is it the kind of immersive where you sit in one place and the cast is all around you?

[5:51] David Rigano: A little bit of both.

[5:52] Mark-Eugene Garcia: It sounded like from what we talked about that, and we'll let her go into this, that there is a little bit in the beginning of the exploration, not a lot.

[6:02] David Rigano: It's like a museum piece, but the majority is things you like you write down and conversations you have.

[6:08] Mark-Eugene Garcia: Okay, because that gets incorporated into the story.

[6:11] David Rigano: There is a solid piece, a lesbian love story.

[6:14] Mark-Eugene Garcia: Yes and it's an old-fashioned lesbian love story.

[6:14] David Rigano: Old fashioned lesbian love story.

[6:18] Mark-Eugene Garcia: It's and the show is about censorship and what is dirty, and it was just really exciting.

[6:24] Dylan Glick: Uh this conversation.

[6:25] Mark-Eugene Garcia: Oh my no, me too.

[6:26] Dylan Glick: Me too.

[6:27] Mark-Eugene Garcia: I already needed to, and everything you're saying is just confirming how much I need to see this show.

[6:32] David Rigano: Yeah, we talked also about some of her other previous projects, and it kind of talked about what we talked about in the last episode, David, about creating work during the pandemic.

[6:42] David Rigano: Uh-huh.

[6:42] Mark-Eugene Garcia: Because there was a lot of work that was created with walking, with being outside.

[6:48] Dylan Glick: Oh yeah.

[6:48] Mark-Eugene Garcia: She talked about putting actors behind glass where the people are outside watching this and the complications of being in New York City.

[7:03] David Rigano: I think.

[7:03] Mark-Eugene Garcia: I don't know. There was like, wasn't there this production of the seven deadly sins?

[7:06] Dylan Glick: This was before I moved to the city, but this was like during the pandemic, I'm pretty sure, where it was like outdoors and it was like seven consecutive short delays out.

[7:13] Mark-Eugene Garcia: But I wouldn't have to Google it after we record this.

[7:15] David Rigano: I would have gone to see that.

[7:16] Dylan Glick: I would have loved that too.

[7:18] Mark-Eugene Garcia: But it just it we talked a little bit about how similar to the screen, how it was one thing for us as actors, as writers, as indie theater creators to create in that time because we needed it, but it also became something that our audiences and our friends and our families all needed.

[7:38] David Rigano: And so looking back at it, we see the hope, the light that that work brought to it.

[7:42] Mark-Eugene Garcia: I have also just always our friends Sophie Macintosh and Nina Goodhart do these, and both of you should join one of them in the future, and they keep getting larger and larger.

[7:53] Dylan Glick: They do these writer-director speed dating events where they put writers and directors together, and you have two minutes to chat until you have to rotate, and then it's the next writer-director.

[8:02] Mark-Eugene Garcia: And you have to fill out a whole form, and then they distill it down to something that they put on your name tag.

[8:08] David Rigano: And I had completely forgotten what I had written, but they put on my name tag, I like doing theater in spaces that are not theaters.

[8:18] Mark-Eugene Garcia: Nice.

[8:19] David Rigano: And it really does distill down so much of I was on TikTok recently talking about breaking down what I have coined the paradigm of the proscenium, and just doing less and less theater that fits in the like picture frame.

[8:38] Mark-Eugene Garcia: And even if it's theater in the round or doing more three quarter, but also doing immersive theater, doing theater in weird spaces.

[8:48] David Rigano: I've directed theater in parks, art galleries, backrooms of bars, rock clubs.

[8:55] Mark-Eugene Garcia: I absolutely for me as a director, I thrive doing theater in a space that put me in a traditional proscenium theater with a good designer.

[9:05] David Rigano: And yes, we can have a lot of fun.

[9:07] Mark-Eugene Garcia: But I just love doing it in non-traditional spaces.

[9:12] Dylan Glick: One of the most rattled I've ever been like leaving a show was this solo show that I saw in the basement of a factory in South Jersey.

[9:21] Mark-Eugene Garcia: Oh, that during Jersey French, and it was called Ghost Stories.

[9:25] Dylan Glick: And it was a solo show of a guy sitting at a table in the basement of this factory telling supposedly real life ghost stories that have happened to him.

[9:34] Mark-Eugene Garcia: And it was very simple, but it was just like the atmosphere and just like walking down the steps and down the long hallway.

[9:39] Dylan Glick: And I don't know.

[9:40] Mark-Eugene Garcia: I love theater in non-traditional spaces so much.

[9:44] David Rigano: That's what we're gonna get into talking about today in this interview.

[9:47] Mark-Eugene Garcia: So I'm gonna pass this off to Mara Lieberman.

[9:51] Mara Lieberman: Welcome, welcome to The Drama Book Show.

[9:53] Mark-Eugene Garcia: I was so happy to have you here.

[9:55] Mara Lieberman: I'm so happy to be here.

[9:56] Mara Lieberman: I'm so excited.

[9:58] Mara Lieberman: It has been really exciting to look up and see the display in the bookshop.

[10:02] Mara Lieberman: It was just it was an ongoing because it was right in front of the register, so it was something we saw like every single day.

[10:08] Mara Lieberman: And I actually found you guys on Instagram beforehand because of your name.

[10:12] Mara Lieberman: Because I have a play called with Bated Breath that I wrote, and then immediately I think because I started posting about it, you popped in my algorithm.

[10:20] Mara Lieberman: And so immediately I've been following you guys for a year, and so I've been I love that.

[10:25] Mara Lieberman: I've been seeing ads for Dirty Books this whole time.

[10:29] Mark-Eugene Garcia: So to see it pop up in front of me.

[10:30] Mara Lieberman: I feel like you're following me too now.

[10:32] Mark-Eugene Garcia: As of that.

[10:32] Mara Lieberman: I'm going to be very much following you now.

[10:35] Mark-Eugene Garcia: But tell me, we'll start at the beginning. Tell me a little bit about the theater company itself. Where did Bated Breath Theater come from?

[10:41] Mara Lieberman: Okay. So Bated Breath is a company that was started by a bunch of Yukon professors.

[10:48] Mara Lieberman: And I was living in Hartford before moving down here.

[10:52] Mara Lieberman: And I actually joined the company as an actor, but I had a directing career and I went to graduate school for directing at and I wanted to join the board because I thought, wow, we're in Hartford, Connecticut, and we're doing like physical theater and non-naturalism and we're pushing boundaries.

[11:11] Mara Lieberman: And I joined the board.

[11:13] Mara Lieberman: And then soon after the artistic director stepped down and she said, I want you to take it over.

[11:18] Mara Lieberman: And I said, I have to think about that.

[11:22] Mara Lieberman: And then I thought about that and I thought, okay, because I was trained in a very particular way by Tina Landau and Ann Bogart.

[11:30] Mara Lieberman: And I make original work.

[11:33] Mara Lieberman: And I say that I make boring things sexy and I write love songs to spaces.

[11:38] Mara Lieberman: And so when I inherited Bated Breath, we had no money, we had no infrastructure, nothing.

[11:44] Mara Lieberman: And I thought museums have a similar decline as theater in terms of urgency relevance, audience engagement.

[11:53] Mara Lieberman: Like, what if we go to museums and make original work based on exhibitions and reignite the objects behind glass and do it in a museum infrastructure, the space, the mailing list, the they have all the things.

[12:10] Mara Lieberman: So I started doing that in Hartford, and it went very well.

[12:15] Mara Lieberman: And then I made a piece about art auctions called Beneath the Gavel, where the audience gets play money shot out of these guns.

[12:22] Mara Lieberman: They get to bid on art, take art home.

[12:24] Mara Lieberman: And I made it for a museum in Hartford and I got it to go to 59 E59.

[12:29] Mara Lieberman: Wow.

[12:30] Mara Lieberman: It was such a great moment, Mark.

[12:32] Mara Lieberman: It was like just this moment of, oh my God.

[12:34] Mara Lieberman: I'm because I was here in my 20s and I threw a bunch of delays, and it took me a while to come back.

[12:41] Mara Lieberman: But after doing the show here, I thought I absolutely have to move the company to New York.

[12:47] Mara Lieberman: I was here part-time for seven and a half years because I have a daughter that I raised in Connecticut.

[12:53] Mara Lieberman: That started this whole kind of immersive taking spaces and writing love songs and deciding what the space want the content to be.

[13:04] Mara Lieberman: And that's how it all started.

[13:07] Mark-Eugene Garcia: I love that.

[13:07] Mark-Eugene Garcia: What were some of the art pieces that inspired you?

[13:10] Mara Lieberman: I have done a really exciting piece about Toulouse Latrec.

[13:15] Mara Lieberman: And I don't know if I don't know, you probably know Voyeur, our walking tour play in the village that we did during the pandemic.

[13:23] Mara Lieberman: But that was inspired by an original museum piece.

[13:29] Mara Lieberman: And it was a French painting evening.

[13:31] Mara Lieberman: And I was making these small pieces that you could, they're called interludes.

[13:36] Mara Lieberman: You could insert them into other events, like French painting evening, French food, French wine, French music, and a little play about Toulouse Latrec.

[13:47] Mara Lieberman: And I did that in Connecticut.

[13:48] Mara Lieberman: And then when I came here, I thought, oh, I want to do a longer version of his life where and put it in like a CD bar because he lived with the sex workers in Montmartre and have this feeling of his life.

[14:04] Mara Lieberman: So I made it in Madame X, this awesome little bar in the village.

[14:08] Mara Lieberman: And we started it two shows a week.

[14:11] Mara Lieberman: And then when the pandemic hit, we were doing six sold-out shows a week.

[14:15] Mara Lieberman: And then I took that and made the walking tour play Voyeur, the windows of Toulouse Latrec, which was the thing that kind of put us on the map.

[14:23] Mara Lieberman: And so that's just one example of I did a play about the making of the wild where the wild things are.

[14:29] Mara Lieberman: That was really much more like grown up than you'd imagine.

[14:34] Mara Lieberman: A lot of those books are.

[14:35] Mara Lieberman: I find when you when you look at a lot of kids' books, I mean, going even back to Seuss, you get these very deep messages that are there to teach us how to be humans at a very early age.

[14:46] Mara Lieberman: Uh, but when we look back at them as adults, it hits that nostalgia and it hits the lesson hits. And I love that. That's very interesting. Yeah, and I love when you can sit with an audience of grown-ups and kids, and they're equally as riveted, and they're different things are pinging inside of them for different reasons, but that they're all just wide-eyed and present is so exciting.

[15:08] Mark-Eugene Garcia: That's very cool. You mentioned your and the pandemic side of it, and it was I've been very intrigued by that because I loved as an indie theater maker, I loved watching other indie theater makers make that pivot into the pandemic world. My friend Carlos did a show called Odd Man Out about being blind.

[15:24] Mara Lieberman: I saw it.

[15:31] Mark-Eugene Garcia: Did you see it? Did you see it? I loved it. And I'm friends with one of the actresses and producers.

[15:36] Mara Lieberman: Yes.

[15:37] Mark-Eugene Garcia: Oh, I love it. Did you do it in person or yes?

[15:40] Mara Lieberman: Oh, cool. And prior to that, because it was supposed to open during the pandemic, he pivoted completely and did a, you would sign up and you would get a little airline ticket, and a box would arrive, and all of the things that you needed were in the box, and it would tell you how to lay it out on your desk or wherever you were, and you put on a headset and the show would happen through like in your ears, and you would pick up the scents and pick up the taste and just to see how a theater can pivot into that and watching other shows do that. So I'd love to hear a little bit about your experience with that.

[16:12] Mara Lieberman: Yeah, I love that idea, by the way. I love the box arriving. And yeah, that is so cool. That is really amazing. Yeah, which also confirms that performance can happen anywhere, which is what Voyeur was trying to underline. So during lockdown, I spent the first couple of months being like, there has to be a way to make live theater safely. Like my degree's in performance studies, I've spent my career looking outside the boundaries of the four walls. What can we do? And I thought, what if the actors are behind glass? And what if the audience is masked and small and walking outside? Okay. And then the actors pop up behind windows of bars and restaurants and public spaces, and we have all this vacancy right now in New York.

And so the owner and manager of the duplex, I got with them, and we concocted this idea. And so it started at the duplex, and the audience is outside the whole time. They have a tour guide that has an old-fashioned organ grinder music box. They sometimes have their own violinist that walks through the village with them, and it's a walking tour play. And you look up at these apartment buildings and these sexy can dancers are in the windows, and there's shadow puppetry in the middle of Sixth Avenue. Obviously, like in the Ruth Wittenberg triangle, not in the middle of traffic. But so this was my way to just keep working. And I didn't really think about what Voyeur was going to do for what's possible in terms of performance, in terms of pandemic performance, in terms of engagement.

And it was so exciting to see the audiences grow and to run for almost a year and to be acknowledged the way that we were acknowledged. It just was so exciting to be like performance really can happen anywhere, and we have to stand up for that possibility.

[18:21] Mara Lieberman: And one of the things I love about this outdoor walking tour theater is that you take this highly articulated form and you throw it up against New York, which is like she's gonna do what she wants to do. And the art is what happens in between the moment of form and chance, and then what happens in between is where the excitement and the danger and then the levels of like people watching people. I love that. It's just as a theater junkie, it was like, oh my god, like I love these moments when anything can happen. And that's as I've gotten older, happened. As an anxiety-filled theater maker, immersive theater fascinates and terrifies me. I have seen some amazing shows, and every time I always walk out with that sense of wow and that same meta sense of people watching people, and I think it's so exciting.

Uh, because it takes you out of the comfort zone, and it puts you in the world of these characters, and it's so unique because you go to the theater and there's a sense of safety. There's a sense of lulling people into this place of it's okay, you're in the dark, you can react however you want. But suddenly you're part of this story, and it's exciting. It's really wonderful. And I also have to commend you on that, just doing that work during the pandemic because so many of us I feel like we tried, we were trying to prove that theater can exist. We were trying to in many ways save ourselves from that situation. But looking back on it now, I see everyone who was doing this work as giving hope, as really posturing that next generation of artists to say, listen, you can exist and there is a place for you, but also reminding the world that like this is what we're fighting to come back to. This is why we're sitting in our houses and not going anywhere till a cure can happen, because we want to get back to this community of art.

[20:27] Mark-Eugene Garcia: It was very exciting when we reopened the bookshop because we had people coming in, and these are people who hadn't talked theater with a theater maker for so long. And the doors opened and people came in, and you would just see strangers looking at each other and just being like, you, you like theater. What are your favorite shows? And there's just something that that was missing from us. And I think that people who created art during that time, you guys really helped bridge that need, helped find us, helped us find each other. So I have to say thank you for that as well.

[20:59] Mara Lieberman: Thank you. I have chills. Thank you. You know, it's no, I it reminds us of the possibility and the vitality of theater. What the potential for what can happen when human beings gather in a room to hear stories, to make art, to make beautiful things happen that can never be reproduced after they've come and gone. And I love that. I love it. I love the idea of sharing air. I love the idea of sharing pages. That's another thing. Like all of these things, it's such a community. And like just to come together and create these feelings, is so wonderful. And that's why I love theater. I feel like it's that in the world where there's so much CGI and AI and all of this stuff. I feel like the live entertainment is the one place we're right now that we're safe.

You can't fake it. You can't make it, especially if you're creating it as you go. People feel that presence, right? People know that they were part of something not reproducible. And that is the exact opposite of how we spend most of our days now.

[22:02] Mark-Eugene Garcia: Yeah, I love those talks. I've met with actors and so on, and we'll talk about it's a very specific show. And they'll be like, oh, when I saw the show, I saw Company and Bobby threw the flowers and they hit the door instead of the person catching them. And I was like, I was there. I saw that. Like I was, but it's that moment of community where you realize that these things can happen. But I mentioned the idea of creating as they go, and that leads me to your newest show, which I have to say has been extended four times now.

[22:27] Mara Lieberman: Yeah.

[22:30] Mark-Eugene Garcia: That is incredible. That is insane. When did you guys start?

[22:36] Mara Lieberman: November 7th.

[22:37] Mark-Eugene Garcia: Wow.

[22:38] Mara Lieberman: Yeah.

[22:38] Mark-Eugene Garcia: That's fantastic. And it was in the works since 2018, but that play, and I'm working on a play about wine tasting with a Bordeaux wine writer. And both of those plays, like during pandemic and right after pandemic, nobody really wants to get in a room and be drinking wine together and talking about sex and mushing up into each other. It wasn't the time, but then the time, the time approached itself to me. It did. I did the La Mama director's symposium last summer.

[23:05] Mara Lieberman: Nice.

[23:10] Mark-Eugene Garcia: And I had an amazing experience. And when I came back, I had this idea for a show I wanted to do. My friends were like, No, you're doing Dirty Books. You put this off long enough. Do it. Do it. And I was like, okay. And I just love that. I got my marching order.

[23:27] Mara Lieberman: There you go.

[23:27] Mark-Eugene Garcia: Where did the concepts come from? We think it's Dirty Books.

[23:30] Mara Lieberman: Yeah, I have a friend who in the 60s used to write softcore porn. And he told me that people would sit around a table. These guys would sit around a table and they'd drink, they played cards, they'd all take 10 minutes at the typewriter, and by the end of the night, they would have a novel and they'd send it to their publisher, and that would be how these books were created. So I'm always looking for ways to make communal experiences with audiences that are theatrical, nerdy, but you don't know they're nerdy. So I thought, here's this thing we could do. We could write an erotic story together. And then I thought, okay, that's gonna be a problem because it's gonna turn into a bar fight, and like all the sexual politics and stuff are gonna come up, that's gonna be a mess.

And then I thought, wait, if we're writing under the anti-obscenity laws of the 60s and early 70s, you have guardrails that are gonna be in place. And if we have a character, and I made up this character called the Warden of the Words, and she's like a 1950s gym teacher with a whistle, a little Sue Celestry, and a little Trunchbull. And if we have this character, then if people go astray, if things go really crazy, she can blow the whistle. And in the context of the show, we at the beginning of the show, we say, in a fun way, these are the rules of writing together. And you can't do this and this. So it also offers the invitation for audiences to have to be creative. And that's what the show really does.

I'm not going to tell you because it would be a spoiler about the sex scene, but the most graphic sex scene is so censored and so hot at the same time. And yeah, so I love this space that people come together and it is safe. And it is, I, as an audience member, have I am so shy. And I know I make participatory and immersive theater, but I am like the person who would be like, no, don't call on me. So I make sure that when I make these shows, that I'm making them for people like me who's who are like terrified. So I think it is safe, but it is communal and it is creative, and it really celebrates the history of censorship and how we've come to this moment now. We're having this strange resurgence that there are books that I'm sure you feel this way too that I read in middle school and high school that are now banned.

And so it is just this play about censorship and the history, Supreme Court trials and the history of censorship is meeting this moment of wow, there is such a resurgence of tamping people's diverse experience and aliveness down. And yeah, it's just exciting that people have a safe room to come to to create and to look at the history and how we got to this moment and how we might evolve to the next set of moments.

[26:39] Mark-Eugene Garcia: I adore that. I and I agree. I feel like we're in this weird dual place where we have some people saying, talk about everything and be direct, and others saying don't talk about anything. And it's so interesting. I found that actually with my play with Bated Breath, there's it's about a cloud of Viagra drugs because of a factory upwind of this town that affects this town. It's based on real events that happened in Ireland. And I originally wrote the play 20 years ago, and then when I wanted to, and during the pandemic, I revisited and rewrote, and the 20-year age difference of 20-year-old Mark versus 40-year-old Mark was big. But also I couldn't have fumes attacking a town like this and people giving in and not talk about consent and not talk about these things.

And so it opened up a doorway for that, and it's a very conservative town. So I ended up writing what I call the most polite orgy that's ever existed. And a lot of with a lot of consent, a lot of may I you betches and all. And so I love this idea that you've created this hot sex scene that is also so not censored, but so just guided and controlled. I love that idea for your show. That's amazing. It's so fun, but it's also that is so cool. It's where we are, I think is what you're describing is that how are we having these conversations? How are we creating these spaces where we can be honest and talk but also feel safe? And that's so intriguing that I'm just oh excited by that.

[28:11] Mara Lieberman: Thank you. One of the things that I love about Dirty Books is that when the audience comes in, the room is set up as a museum exhibit about censorship. And they participate, they do a bunch of writing prompts. So, you know, one of them, I don't know if I should say it, but is what's one of the dirtiest things anyone ever said to you? And you write this on a card and you put it in a bag, and there's like view masters you look in, and there's these interactive moments that you have before the show starts, but you don't know how or when that there'll be a return of these elements, and then we weave them through the play, and the characters end up making it part of that. There's part of a trial scene where they have to read a dirty passage from a book, and it ends up being the cards that the audience wrote.

There's a whole thing about the view masters, and if you know what's in that, it's like a secret between the audience and the actor. Like if you know what's on there, then the whole scene has context and risk. And so I love the idea of the audience participating in ways that are less direct, but more like an inside joke that they all are in on.

[29:22] Mara Lieberman: I love that. What a safe way to participate for those of us who are nervous in that world who don't want to get pulled up on stage. I adore that. That is so cool. I'm sorry, I'm just grinning at that idea of that. Thank you. Oh, wow. And you and you're going on now till April.

[29:43] Mark-Eugene Garcia: Yeah.

[29:43] Mara Lieberman: Wow. And maybe beyond this. I was like, yeah, it's definitely been like a word of mouth thing. My shows usually are because they're intimate and they're hard to tie up in a bow. Ann Bogart said once that making theater is like making a surprise party for someone you really love.

[30:04] Mark-Eugene Garcia: Yes.

[30:04] Mara Lieberman: Oh, and I really feel like my plays are love songs to the audience, and they just break expectation at every moment, and that they really invite revealing and also feeling seen. Like I want the audience to feel that we've seen them, that they've mattered, that their presence in that room really mattered, and do that all the while telling a good story and making really good art.

[30:32] Mara Lieberman: And what's funny, my partner came to watch a rehearsal, and she's a professor in psychology, or she was, but she has never seen the process of a rehearsal before. And she got to sit in on an evening of us bringing in new actors and teaching them. And she couldn't believe how detailed the work was like every angle of the hand, every breath, every the pacing, the vocal pitch, like she didn't realize how all of those details are woven together to create this composite experience, but they all are a gift to the audience. They all are part of the surprise party, that level of detail, and it was so great to have that reflected back because as a theater maker, how you just obsess over every little thing, and that performance kind of masks that because it looks easy, it looks spontaneous, but it's so crafted.

[31:31] Mark-Eugene Garcia: I love that. What was the process, the rehearsal process like?

[31:34] Mara Lieberman: The rehearsal process. So I work very much as I've been working for the last like 25, 30 years. It starts off with some. I do a lot of dramaturgy. I do a lot of, I think of myself as like a bloodhound. Like I'm sniffing sense. Oh, Supreme Court trial transcripts or this passage in this dirty book from the 60s. And then we come into this devising process. So I bring in actors and I try not to tell them anything of the deeper dramaturgical legs or kind of the way I see the final product. I want them and I want me to be able to live in unknowing, because that's where these incredible surprises happen, where I create these, they're called composition assignments, and I give them basically theatrical ingredients.

You must have the following action, crying and laughing at the same time, slamming a door, sound from an unexpected source, like you open a purse and there's an opera voice. You have to use all these props in ways that they're not intended. So a pen becomes a telephone. You have to use a nursery rhyme instead of any line. And I and we do this for a series of weeks, and I video the result, and they have only 20 minutes to make these pieces. So we put exquisite pressure underneath them, and I record everything, and then I go away and I write. And sometimes I don't even know how this stew is this recipe is making itself, and the elements, maybe it's just, oh, sorry, the way the actor looked over their shoulder, the way they handled the telephone, the way they used the color red.

These disparate elements weave themselves together inside my brain. And then they come out. Okay, here's the scene. And then I bring those pages back and we try them and we tweak. And then there's a lot of there's like the general shape, but then there's this thing that I call carving. When we get to the carving, is like we know the narrative line, we know the scenes and the orders and what they're driving to. We probably have most of the text, but these moment to moment breathing angles of the arms, as if you're choreographing a dance. It goes so deep and it's painstaking. It's very we start at absolute freedom with the compositions and we end with absolute specificity. And the balance of those things, I think, are what come together to make this highly crafted form feel so alive.

[34:20] Mara Lieberman: I love actors for that reason too. I tell a lot of the my collaborators that I work with a lot of the actors that the most exciting part of a rehearsal is knowing that the script that I brought in is not the script that's gonna leave. Because there's a there's a point. I've had actors like come up with like questions and this and that. And I had one years ago who was like, I'm so sorry I have all these questions. I'm like, are you kidding me? No, like at this point, I'm keeping track of six people. You're keeping track of one, and you know her better than me now. So absolutely I love it. Let's figure this out together. We were playing, we were doing improv games together, and we figured out a whole scene because she's like, I don't know if I would say that.

I'm like, all right, I'll say his lines and you improv back at me, and we will come up with this together. I love that so much. Oh my god, it's I just there's text is great, but it's about the reality. It's about what we can create together. And I love collaborative creations.

[35:12] Mark-Eugene Garcia: That's just I do too.

[35:15] Mara Lieberman: Yeah, it's what to extend it to the audience and be like, okay, now you're gonna collaborate. Yes. Now you're gonna make meaning for us with us. And it's funny because my sister's a painter and she's a visual artist and she's amazing. Like that the kind of allegorical narrative stories that just you know are electrifying off her canvases are amazing. She says, Oh, I want, I want to do what you do. I don't want to be alone, I want to be collaborative. And then I'm like, I want to do what you do. I want to be able to just sit in a studio and make the thing. But the truth is that's not true. What's true is you're right, and you're reminding me about how in the collaborative moment, in all in saying to an actor, hey, you know this better than I do.

You know it from embodied inside out. What do you you know, what what does this need to be in the world? How does this need to be in the world? It is such a gift to be able to be in a room with people doing that. Actors are smart, like creators are smart. That's the thing is, and it's remembering that, and that we're all here to tell a story. And I love the fact that you guys have all gathered together to do that, which makes me want to ask have there ever been some wacky responses that have changed your production as they happen.

[36:32] Mara Lieberman: Yeah, totally. So learning how to corral the audience in terms of the participation is the thing. And the warden of the words is also the person who elicits the responses. So she has a flashlight and she shines it on you when you give an answer, you fill in the blank, the audience gets to name the characters, the book title that we're writing. And so early on, I think that the actors were very polite. And so there's this moment where we go, like, first name, and then someone was like, er, or like her, and then we were like, okay, the name is err. And then what's her husband's name? Mmm. Husband name, wife name er. And then we had to say, okay, you're being really respectful. But what happens then when an audience member gives a totally outlying title or name, they're having fun, and that's amazing, but they don't understand that this is going to build to something that matters.

And if we have to say er for the husband and wife the whole time, that you're actually gonna be detracted for being able to give yourself over to the narrative line, the character's journey. Like it's really important to get participation that actually adds to the experience rather than and plus I think people are used to sleep no more, where you can go right rifling to other drawers or you push the boundaries. And we do like when people push the boundaries, and we do love participation, and it's totally okay if somebody says something wild, but then we have learned how to be like, honey, that's not gonna work, and then shine the flashlight on someone else and be like, What about you? Or the warden's character, she's like a sergeant a little, so she can be like, now at you.

I don't like that now, but it's never in a mean way, it's just another we're all making this thing, and we don't expect the audience to understand how important it is to have names that don't distract later on. But yeah, we've had we've had audience members get up and do things that are unanticipated. But one of the beautiful things about this show, and I really just have to salute the performers and the whole team, is that the narrative is so compelling. This there's a lesbian love story that's at the center of this that was in my very first formulation of the show back in 2018. I thought, what if there are these guys that are writing this dirty book together? But one of the guys' wives finds out that he writes, he thinks maybe he writes instruction manuals for technical things.

She finds out he writes porn and she decides to best him at the writing and write under a pseudonym. And she falls in love with his business partner's wife, and then we have this lesbian love story. So there's this really beautiful lesbian love story that's at the center of it. And I think that it's so compelling that the audience really doesn't go too crazy. Like we have moments, but it the story drives it. And yeah, and that's it gets controlled by the audience's own investment in the story.

[39:41] Mark-Eugene Garcia: Yeah, it really comes down to heart.

[39:43] Mara Lieberman: And I love that. I think the best theater pieces do the best comedies are have heart, the best like draw. It's really that. And that's to know that's the center of it. Just ugly I am so fascinated by this. When how often a week do you guys perform?

[39:59] Mark-Eugene Garcia: Two times a week. The Thursdays and Saturdays, usually, the Mondays, because we love industry people that come.

[40:06] Mara Lieberman: As a person who runs events, I get that.

[40:08] Mark-Eugene Garcia: Yes. I was like, oh, I hate doing them on Mondays, but it's the only time we can get someone off from Broadway to come be our moderator or something.

[40:15] Mara Lieberman: Totally. And they're so excited to have something to do that's not competing with a million other things. Which is great. And uh yeah, we just love it. And we've really turned this, it's a studio. Like it's that office space. It's not a theater per se. And people come down the hall in this, it's in the village, and it's in this cool building. They're offices, they're office suites, and people wander around like, where's a murder? Where's the immersive play? It's then I open the door and they go, Oh my god.

[40:47] Mark-Eugene Garcia: I adore that.

[40:48] Mara Lieberman: It's just theater popping up out of nowhere is so exciting.

[40:53] Mark-Eugene Garcia: That's amazing.

[40:54] Mara Lieberman: Love that. And in fact, during the pandemic, when I did voyeur, I had people that stumbled upon the show. I always used to say the best commercial for the show is the show, because we would be wandering through the village, and then we would have one person with the group that would hand out these little three by three cards where they could people could buy tickets. But I had people say, Your show really kept me hopeful and alive during like come off the subway, and then I'd see the little dancer with the tutu going down Greenwich and hear the music, and it really kept me so hopeful. And I really love this idea that people set out for the day not expecting to see performance, and then all of a sudden, boom.

That's we did chasing Andy Warhol, which was also a walking tour play on the east side the year after, and it was the same thing. It started in Astor Place, and just to have people walking through Astor Place and having this performance happening, and we had this 25 foot puppet of Andy Warhol, just to make theater more accessible and more woven into people's everyday lives, is so exciting to me.

[42:02] Mark-Eugene Garcia: Yeah, it's a reminder that we have the Timothy Chalamers of the World who are saying that opera and ballet are fading, and I feel like I bet he regrets that, huh?

[42:10] Mara Lieberman: Oh, I'm sure he does. I want to put up a table of just opera and ballet books at the shop and be like recommended by it is a place where there is a very niche theater is such a niche world. But I feel like these performances are what are bringing it back into the forefront and reminding the public that hey, it's not just about sitting in the dark for two and a half hours. You can experience something and you can be part of something and influence something. And that's to me is incredible. That's like my whole mission statement. What you just said as a maker, it's like how to help create a robust future for American theater and feeling like younger people don't want to sit in the dark for hours and hours. They want to be seen, they want to be involved, and they don't want they want to be able to do other things. So I try to keep the show short. This is an hour and 20 minutes of a show. And that's that's like on the longer side for me.

[43:05] Mark-Eugene Garcia: I agree.

[43:06] Mara Lieberman: And I love immersive theater, but do I love it because I love it, or do I love it because I feel like it might be the future of American theater? And I don't know the answer to that, but I just want to say a big yes to all of it because the innovation inside of it, and also I started last year, last March, the New York Center for Immersive Theater as a place, a place where people could come and continue to innovate this art form that I think does hold possibility for the future of American theater. That I don't want to be codified and say this is what it is. No, it's this, or it's this. Let's not answer that question. Let's keep pushing the form and see what audience engagement looks like as we pioneer this. And although the New York Century for Immersive Theater has been on the back burner because of dirty books, it's still here as a place for query and for what is possible that is engaging and safe and smart and artistic and alive.

[44:12] Mara Lieberman: And that's what I really want for us. That is beautiful in my own small way. I that wow. Wow. I'm still taking that in. That is fantastic. I only have a couple more questions because I want people to go into this surprised and excited. And so my last two, and one will circle back to that. What's next for you? You mentioned a wine tasting show, but what's your next steps?

[44:35] Mara Lieberman: Yeah. So I, when I was in my 20s, and I was here in New York, I did an adaptation of Virginia Woolf's To the Lighthouse. I did it in New Georgians, gave me what they called the room. I think within the Garment District, they just had a big room and they let me have it for a couple of weekends. And I was sitting on the floor with little dimmers, like working the clip lights, and it was a 45-minute adaptation of To the Lighthouse, it's a beautiful book by Virginia Woolf. It's so dense in a way, it's like eating the most wonderful chocolates. You have to just have a couple, just taste them, savor. And I really loved what that was. We used the architecture of the room. We used some of my Suzuki training.

And I had been thinking about, and this is ooh, do I say it? This idea of coming back to the lighthouse, but having it around this huge long dinner table that can seat like 25. But the table is magic, and you don't know that the table has these secret compartments, has things that happen underneath, opens up, and there's like a canal of water that a boat goes down in the middle of the table, involves some eating things, and that around so the idea is that this happens in like an English drawing room with a long table and cabinets and cupboards everywhere, and that all the little things are revelations. So this is something I'm so excited about, and I've been thinking about because I could do this in a smaller room, so that's something that's like working inside of me, and I'd like to go into devising for that in the summer.

I've been talking to our company members about starting that devising process, and then there is this play about Bordeaux wine that I've been writing with this famous wine writer. Her name is Jane Anson. She wrote this book called Inside Bordeaux, and it's incredible. We've been working on this, and then also I adapted a bestseller called Bitter Sweet by Susan Kane. And that is in conversation too. Lots of things are lots of things up there. I, as a writer, I get that. People are like, What are you working on? I'm like, Oh my god, do I have to list like 10 times? Because our brains have multiple tabs open at once.

[46:58] Mark-Eugene Garcia: Oh, I love how you just said that. That is so true. Somebody asked me that at work. They said, Why do you have all these tabs on your computer? I'm like, because that's how I think. I can't, I don't think in a linear way.

[47:07] Mara Lieberman: I love it. I love that, and also like the urgency of the place come to you. Like, I didn't know Dirty Books would be done now. Like it was in the hopper, but I didn't really, it's and I was listening to the David Adjmi's interview with you, and I love that. And I actually went to college with him.

[47:25] Mark-Eugene Garcia: Oh wow.

[47:25] Mara Lieberman: I saw Stereophonic five times because I was just riveted. That's a lot of hours. I loved it. That's such a good show. He yeah, he directed me in a show in college, and I just I loved him. So anyway, I was listening to him talking about how he doesn't even know sometimes where these ideas come from. But like all of a sudden he'll watch his own show and be like, oh yeah, that's my brother. Oh yeah, that's I feel like these shows are percolating inside of me. And then it took me two months of watching Dirty Books to realize that it's a funeral for my marriage because I got divorced a couple years ago, and I didn't even realize it. I'm making this like incredible story about owning your own life and an anthem to women loving women, and just and I didn't realize it. So sometimes what I'm saying is that these shows pick you. One of your tabs on open in your brain will reach out into your heart and be like, it's time for me.

[48:25] Mark-Eugene Garcia: Oh, I love that. Because uh oh my god, that hit me very hard. That is beautiful. Yeah, now I'm rethinking all of my shows in my tabs.

[48:33] Mara Lieberman: Um I love that for you too. What would you what advice would you give to someone who wants to create immersive theater?

[48:42] Mara Lieberman: Yeah, yeah, I know that's a big one, but I think it's important. Because I worked with you, I'm gonna tell this in a long way, but because I worked with museums for so many years, I'm really used to no's. So I'd be like, Can I have this actor rollerblade down the hall with all these Picassos? And I just needed to try. And of course they said no, but I'm used to taking no's and turning them into yeses. And for immersive theater makers, I would just say, let's just wipe away all of the ideas about I have to have this. I need this. It has to look like this. This is the way it's done. Like anytime someone says to me, like, but this is how we do it, my brain, I'm a little bit of a rebel. So my brain is like, hmm, really.

Maybe we should rethink it. So anybody who wants to make immersive theater, you don't need a certain kind of space. You don't need a certain kind of budget. Props are my best friend. I use umbrellas, I use napkins, I use feathers, I use everyday objects you could get at Michael's and create this landscape that's very sensory and transforms these everyday objects into metaphorical beacons. And I would just say, you can do it, and you don't need anything, and don't let anyone tell you like you need to raise like this much money. Like just make the thing, do the thing and care about the art. Let's make excellence in art because in this country, everything is under this economic pressure. And so a lot of times we put things up that aren't fully baked, or we haven't made the best theatrical choices to have the art itself be really sublime. Like just focus on the moment to moment and make that as gorgeous as you can and invite people and they will come.

[50:38] Mark-Eugene Garcia: I love that. And it's great words of encouragement for all our future theater makers out there. Where can they find you?

[50:45] Mara Lieberman: Where can they find you to as a resource and as someone they want to follow? They can find me at I have a website, maralieberman.com, and I love working with younger theater makers and love encouraging, talking, inspiring, and being inspired. dirtybooksplay.com is the website for the show, and batedbreaththeater.org. And then of course we're on Instagram and Facebook and all the things. But yeah, I'm so excited actually to I want to start leading some conversations, salons, labs where we just come in a space. Let's make things go.

[51:26] Mark-Eugene Garcia: That is wonderful. And they can get their tickets for the show from Dirty Books Play.

[51:31] Mara Lieberman: Dirty Books Play. dirtybooksplay.com is where you get the tickets.

[51:34] Mark-Eugene Garcia: That is fantastic. Thank you so much.

[51:37] Mara Lieberman: Thank you, Mark. This is so much fun.

[51:40] Mark-Eugene Garcia: It's a wonderful combo.

[51:42] Mara Lieberman: Yes, yes. I love nerding out on theater. I just I get to do that.

[51:46] Mark-Eugene Garcia: Oh, it's the best job.

[51:48] Mara Lieberman: Absolutely best job.

[51:49] Mark-Eugene Garcia: Oh, wonderful. And we are back. So I hope we got some good information about some dirty books. I'm excited to see the show. I really am. I've got a question.

[51:56] Mara Lieberman: Yeah.

[51:59] Mark-Eugene Garcia: Because we talked about doing immersive theater, and then you talked about Dylan, you talked a little bit about that ghost story. But I also want to know what are the most fun and weirdest immersive plays, theatrical events that you've seen.

[52:13] Mara Lieberman: I had this great experience. I went to go see this show called Vulevu. My friend Carlos Armesto directed it. And he does a series of these, and they were basically one night only theatrical party experiences where he turned a warehouse into no, he turned a warehouse into the basically what he wanted to do was recreate historical events through a queer lens. And so he turned this warehouse into the Moulin Rouge, except through a queer lens. Big fan of Moulin Rouge. It was so much fun because everybody came in. Oh no, you have no idea what you missed with this thing. But you walk in, you walk through a long hallway, it was in Long Island City, and the Green Fairy met you, gave you absinthe to drink, and you walk in, and there is a full like dance party, like club happening, courtesans walking around. At one point that's not hallucinogen laced acts.

[53:11] Mark-Eugene Garcia: No, okay.

[53:11] Mara Lieberman: Uh people in full costumes, they would I believe there was a fortune teller, there was all of these things happening there. At one point, I remember going under a staircase because a courtesan lured me there, and then she's like talking to me and just telling me things, courtesan conversation, I would say. But at one point, she rips off. I go every year. Yeah, she rips off her wig and she had like face thing and rips that off too, and it's a man like full beard mustache, and is and he's I don't want to do this. They're making me do this. Please take this note to the man in the hat and let that because he is a cop and he is a cop and he will help me. And then me going out with this little note looking for a man in a hat.

Meanwhile, where people are dancing, and you'll be dancing, and then suddenly a musical number just erupts around you because they had six different groups who were like pro trained dancers doing these numbers, and it just suddenly appears. And so it was this whole story that you were there for this one night at the Moulin Rouge, and it was incredible.

[54:16] Mark-Eugene Garcia: That's so exciting. He did multiple nights of that. He did an 80s one, he did La Frique, which was a salute to black music. There was a 70s. You have to let us know the next time.

[54:26] Mara Lieberman: Oh yeah, yeah. It was it was incredible. Speaking of jobs I applied for and didn't get, there was an immersive Gatsby.

[54:33] Mark-Eugene Garcia: Oh, I remember hearing about that.

[54:34] Mara Lieberman: Quite literally, that was the one that I was going to talk about in terms of I so der Do you have any more thoughts about okay. So I was in the UK for my study abroad semester, and there was one of my friends when I told them I'm just going, they were like, You have to go to immersive Gatsby if you can. And it was in this like warehouse, and it started in this teeny tiny little bar, and then suddenly the back of the bar opened, and you were in Gatsby's mansion. And it was like it was that kind of thing where it was like Tom was like, Hey, Nick, and all of you over here, come with me. I want you to meet my mistress. And then took us to a back room. Love and him and Myrtle were like hooking up against a closed door that where we were in this room, we had to listen to it.

Nick was like, Okay. Like it was very it was a it was great. Oh yes, it was uh it was just a great time. And to be there was one point where like Nick was like, What do you think I should do, guys? And we had to come up with an answer, and it was a very like, we don't really and he was like, We'll do this. Great. And I don't know, it was just it was incredible. I hope that in a couple weeks we'll all be able to have this same conversation about Dirty Books because it sounds astounding.

[55:45] Mara Lieberman: It's so cool to hear that was your experience because what I thought they did so brilliantly was that they would send people to different rooms, and you would still have to get the same exposition no matter what room you went to. So I, while I was having my drink, what's Myrtle's husband's name? Oh well, it's like Wolfsheim is the investor. He's the mechanic. Yeah. So he because this I this is the same production when it came to New York. That was when I was interviewing to do front of house stuff and make the front of house more immersive so that actors would be bringing the audience literally from the street to the into the show. And but so when I went to see it, he came up to me and my friend while we were having our drink, and he was like, Hey, I want you to stand over here and you're gonna help me move some boxes later.

And just stand here. And if anyone says if anyone else tries to get you to go with them, just tell you that tell them that you're enjoying the view. And then when probably when Nick took you into whatever room, yeah, he came to us and he was like, Okay, you're gonna come over here and you're gonna move stuff for us. And we went, we said to him, like, why how did you know you could trust us? Why do you why did you choose us to do this for you? And he goes, I saw that you had drinks, so I know that you can move some bootleg. It was so and then he brought us to Wolfsheim, and we have so like no matter what path you took, you would hear people gossiping about all of the same stuff, so you would get all of the same information from Gatsby, no matter what room you had been in. I thought it was brilliantly done.

[57:15] Mark-Eugene Garcia: That is so smart, and something that that again only immersive theater can do, and I'm looking forward to seeing this show and discussing it in the future.

[57:25] Mara Lieberman: Yeah.

[57:25] Mark-Eugene Garcia: Going from Dirty Books to the dirtiest title of a book that we probably had.

[57:31] Mara Lieberman: Probably.

[57:32] Mark-Eugene Garcia: Then in our next episode, Dylan and I got to have a real great conversation. It was a great time. And about Prince Faggot. And we all got to experience a really cool interview of Jordan Tannehill. So I'm really looking forward to sharing that episode with all of our listeners. So remember, follow us on Instagram at Drama Book Show podcast. Please subscribe to the Drama Book Shop on Eventbrite so that you can be alerted whenever we add new in-person events to our calendar. Give us some likes and subscribes and some stars and some comments. Engage with us. We love it. We love asking questions.

[58:07] Mara Lieberman: Yes.

[58:09] Mark-Eugene Garcia: Produce our plays. That too. All the things. Prescribe. And remember, all the books we talk about can be found here at the Drama Bookshop. And so can we. And we will see you at the bookshop.