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[0:18] David Rigano: Hello and welcome to The Drama Book Show.

[0:21] Mark-Eugene Garcia: I'm David Rigano.

[0:22] Mark-Eugene Garcia: I am Mark-Eugene Garcia, and we're on episode eight.

[0:25] David Rigano: Yeah.

[0:25] Mark-Eugene Garcia: Why do I keep counting?

[0:27] David Rigano: I don't know.

[0:28] Mark-Eugene Garcia: Because it's still so new to us.

[0:30] David Rigano: Like we spent all of this time.

[0:32] Mark-Eugene Garcia: We do events every week.

[0:33] David Rigano: Yes.

[0:34] Mark-Eugene Garcia: We know how busy we got putting these events on and recording them.

[0:39] David Rigano: And but actually turning these events into a podcast, I think is still so new to us that we're like, wow, we got eight on these.

[0:46] Mark-Eugene Garcia: I know.

[0:47] Mark-Eugene Garcia: It's like when you get into a relationship and you have anniversaries.

[0:51] David Rigano: Yeah, your week anniversary, your month of anniversaries.

[0:55] Mark-Eugene Garcia: I've been with someone for 20 years, so I don't know.

[0:57] David Rigano: I still count.

[0:58] Mark-Eugene Garcia: Yeah, I still count all of them.

[1:00] David Rigano: How many weeks are you and Roddy at?

[1:02] Mark-Eugene Garcia: Oh god, I don't know.

[1:04] David Rigano: Well, welcome.

[1:05] Mark-Eugene Garcia: 20 years.

[1:06] Mark-Eugene Garcia: I bet some rent heads could do the math and tell you exactly how many minutes you...

[1:10] David Rigano: I think they could, but then you have to, I mean, this was a leap year, so who knows?

[1:13] Mark-Eugene Garcia: Oh, yeah.

[1:14] Mark-Eugene Garcia: Okay.

[1:14] David Rigano: That throws off everything.

[1:16] Mark-Eugene Garcia: Yeah.

[1:16] Mark-Eugene Garcia: We're back with more Women's History Month and an amazing event that we had with Emily Mann.

[1:23] David Rigano: Alexis Greene is a biographer, and she has written a biography of Emily Mann entitled Rebel Artist of the American Theater.

[1:31] Mark-Eugene Garcia: Right.

[1:31] Mark-Eugene Garcia: And Emily was...

[1:32] David Rigano: She talked a lot about her story about being one of the first women directors.

[1:37] Mark-Eugene Garcia: Yeah, for the stage.

[1:38] David Rigano: I mean, told that she couldn't.

[1:39] Mark-Eugene Garcia: Yes.

[1:40] David Rigano: There was a lot of times in her career in the beginning, specifically in school and afterwards, where people would say, "Oh, you can't direct, you're a woman."

[1:49] Mark-Eugene Garcia: Yeah.

[1:49] Mark-Eugene Garcia: Yeah.

[1:50] David Rigano: And she said, "No."

[1:51] Mark-Eugene Garcia: I said to her afterward, and this is a little bit of a spoiler for the episode to come, but I said to her afterward, "Someone really said to you that you couldn't direct The Glass Menagerie?"

[2:01] David Rigano: Doesn't that feel like a very woman-forward play?

[2:04] Mark-Eugene Garcia: And she was like, "Yeah, you'd think so, right?"

[2:07] David Rigano: Yeah.

[2:08] Mark-Eugene Garcia: And she became kind of a Williams whisperer.

[2:11] David Rigano: Yeah.

[2:12] Mark-Eugene Garcia: Yeah, because she did Menagerie.

[2:14] David Rigano: She did Night of the Iguana.

[2:15] Mark-Eugene Garcia: Yeah, that was her most recent.

[2:16] David Rigano: She was in rehearsals for Night of the Iguana.

[2:19] Mark-Eugene Garcia: Right.

[2:19] Mark-Eugene Garcia: I believe she said she did Summer and Smoke at one point too.

[2:22] David Rigano: And there was a fourth.

[2:23] Mark-Eugene Garcia: Uh, you'll hear it when you get to it.

[2:25] David Rigano: But she did four before she worked with Tennessee Williams.

[2:28] Mark-Eugene Garcia: She knew him.

[2:29] David Rigano: Yeah.

[2:30] David Rigano: So she's coming at this with a real authority.

[2:35] Mark-Eugene Garcia: Definitely.

[2:35] Mark-Eugene Garcia: And we got to see some of that authority too.

[2:37] David Rigano: Yeah.

[2:37] Mark-Eugene Garcia: You got to see the show.

[2:38] David Rigano: Yes.

[2:39] Mark-Eugene Garcia: We both went to see the show.

[2:40] David Rigano: Uh, and I don't know Night of the Iguana.

[2:43] Mark-Eugene Garcia: It's not one of the more produced ones.

[2:45] David Rigano: Right.

[2:45] Mark-Eugene Garcia: But we had some favorites in there.

[2:48] David Rigano: Daphne Rubin-Vega, Lea DeLaria.

[2:51] Mark-Eugene Garcia: Oh my gosh.

[2:51] Mark-Eugene Garcia: And obviously Tim Daly.

[2:54] David Rigano: Yes.

[2:55] Mark-Eugene Garcia: Uh-huh.

[2:55] Mark-Eugene Garcia: And she talked about, obviously, there are so many queer undertones in so much of Williams that he was not at the time able to make as overt as maybe he would have liked to.

[3:08] David Rigano: Right.

[3:08] David Rigano: The time wouldn't allow it.

[3:09] Mark-Eugene Garcia: Yeah.

[3:09] Mark-Eugene Garcia: And so she talked a lot about particularly Lea's character, really looking at the queer overtones and how other people react to her.

[3:21] David Rigano: Yeah, and bringing it to the forefront.

[3:23] Mark-Eugene Garcia: Yeah.

[3:23] Mark-Eugene Garcia: The one thing with this production is that it was very direct.

[3:28] David Rigano: Yes.

[3:28] David Rigano: Yeah.

[3:29] Mark-Eugene Garcia: In its storytelling.

[3:30] David Rigano: There was not a lot of hiding anything.

[3:33] Mark-Eugene Garcia: It was about, okay, we're going to put the story first and forefront.

[3:36] David Rigano: Yeah.

[3:36] David Rigano: And you really understood the prejudices that people had for people around them.

[3:42] Mark-Eugene Garcia: And I think it helped that there were these prejudices, but no one held them really for the Nazi couple.

[3:51] David Rigano: No, not at all.

[3:52] Mark-Eugene Garcia: Not at all.

[3:54] Mark-Eugene Garcia: It was this comic relief.

[3:55] David Rigano: And everyone was like, "Oh, those crazy Nazis are singing Deutschland, Deutschland Über Alles."

[4:02] Mark-Eugene Garcia: But the vitriol that was thrown to the woman who did not conform to feminine ways of who was trying to protect a younger woman.

[4:14] David Rigano: Yeah.

[4:14] David Rigano: No, that's it. It was very interesting.

[4:17] Mark-Eugene Garcia: And also there was so much story.

[4:20] David Rigano: It's a very long show.

[4:21] David Rigano: I forgot that going into it.

[4:23] Mark-Eugene Garcia: And then I was on a three-show binge of like in two days, I was seeing a bunch of theater, and I saved the three-hour plus one for the end.

[4:32] David Rigano: But I was constantly just riveted, like what is gonna happen?

[4:36] Mark-Eugene Garcia: And I don't know the show, so it was all new to me.

[4:39] David Rigano: So I was very excited by it.

[4:40] Mark-Eugene Garcia: It was brand new to me.

[4:42] Mark-Eugene Garcia: I love Williams, but I really do know the big ones.

[4:46] David Rigano: And so it was fun to go into a brand new Williams.

[4:52] Mark-Eugene Garcia: Yeah, especially having heard her talk about her rehearsal process.

[4:56] David Rigano: Yeah, having her break it down for us was very, very cool.

[5:00] Mark-Eugene Garcia: I really, really just enjoyed listening to her talk about her whole career of being that person who not only opened the door but held it open for other people.

[5:08] David Rigano: Yeah, and that's a big thing is saying, okay, I'm here, but so is everybody else.

[5:13] Mark-Eugene Garcia: And who wasn't just a director, but she was a writer, she was an adapter.

[5:18] David Rigano: I mean, I just actually picked up a copy of her adaptation of The House of Bernarda Alba.

[5:24] Mark-Eugene Garcia: Right.

[5:24] Mark-Eugene Garcia: So she was doing lore, which I cannot wait to...

[5:27] David Rigano: I just found that on our shelves.

[5:29] Mark-Eugene Garcia: I can't wait to hear her take on this very female-forward story.

[5:35] David Rigano: And she's talking about writing when you know that you're the one who's gonna put it on stage.

[5:40] Mark-Eugene Garcia: Right.

[5:41] Mark-Eugene Garcia: Get a kind of a shorthand with yourself.

[5:43] David Rigano: Yeah.

[5:44] David Rigano: Knowing, "Oh hey, future me, this is I'm gonna be dealing with this."

[5:47] Mark-Eugene Garcia: She really covered everything, not just directing.

[5:50] David Rigano: Yeah.

[5:51] David Rigano: A true artist.

[5:53] Mark-Eugene Garcia: A rebel artist, if you will.

[5:57] David Rigano: We've known each other too long.

[5:58] Mark-Eugene Garcia: Yeah.

[5:58] Mark-Eugene Garcia: Well, let's dive in.

[5:59] David Rigano: Why don't we get to know Emily Mann, rebel artist of the American Theater?

[6:10] Alexis Greene: So I thought I would start with a bit of background about how I started to write a biography of the great Emily Mann.

[6:18] Alexis Greene: Um, it goes back to Lucy Lortel, actually, because her estate asked me to write a biography of Lucille after she had passed, and they gave me access to all her papers, and I spoke with her friends and her colleagues.

[6:31] Alexis Greene: I relished writing about her because she was a significant off-Broadway producer, if somewhat controversial.

[6:40] Alexis Greene: And after I'd finished that and it was published, I wanted to write another biography of a woman in the theater because number one, I think there should be more biographies of women in the theater.

[6:53] Emily Mann: Absolutely.

[6:57] Alexis Greene: Thank you, yes.

[6:58] Alexis Greene: And I wanted to be able to talk with the person I was writing about in person.

[7:03] Alexis Greene: And Emily and I had known each other for a number of years.

[7:08] Alexis Greene: I'd interviewed her for a previous book I'd written and edited, and we've been on panels together, and I wrote a profile of you for American Theater magazine.

[7:20] Alexis Greene: And I also adored your playwriting and your directing.

[7:24] Alexis Greene: And one day I just I got onto LinkedIn and I wrote you a message.

[7:29] Alexis Greene: And I said, "What would you think about my, you know, writing a biography of you?"

[7:34] Alexis Greene: And you wrote back, "Yes."

[7:38] Emily Mann: Actually, I've always wanted to know why did you agree?

[7:43] Alexis Greene: That's a good question.

[7:44] Emily Mann: Well, you know, I think I had no idea what it would entail.

[7:48] Emily Mann: I just knew I liked you.

[7:50] Emily Mann: And I trusted you, and I thought, "Oh, how cool, sure. Go ahead."

[7:55] Emily Mann: I didn't know that I opened up my life to you.

[8:01] Alexis Greene: And I'm just very glad I did.

[8:04] Emily Mann: Thank you.

[8:04] Alexis Greene: Emily was incredibly generous because we met probably at least twice a month in your office at the McArthur to talk.

[8:12] Alexis Greene: And you opened up all your files, your personal files for me.

[8:17] Emily Mann: I did not.

[8:18] Alexis Greene: That takes a lot of trust, as you can imagine.

[8:23] Emily Mann: I did that, yes.

[8:25] Emily Mann: And both with your friends and fellow artists, and visited the places where you had grown up in Northampton, Massachusetts, and Chicago, traveled around.

[8:37] Alexis Greene: And was there anything in the biography that surprised you that you hadn't anticipated?

[8:42] Emily Mann: Well, I had not known that my father's unit in World War II had liberated Buchenville.

[8:52] Emily Mann: I found that out through Alexis's incredible research.

[8:56] Emily Mann: She went to my father's papers at the University of Chicago, right?

[9:00] Alexis Greene: At Regginson?

[9:01] Emily Mann: Yeah.

[9:02] Emily Mann: And she found the evidence, and my father never talked to us about it.

[9:07] Emily Mann: And that, and I look at the pianist group in the back, and at my dear friend Ellie.

[9:12] Emily Mann: I didn't know that.

[9:14] Emily Mann: And when I found it out, I told Nadine, Ellie, I feel like we're at an extended dinner party here.

[9:20] Emily Mann: So almost everyone is a dear friend here.

[9:23] Emily Mann: Um, I told Nadine and her father had been incarcerated.

[9:27] Emily Mann: So he had actually liberated one of my best friends' father.

[9:33] Emily Mann: So that was a mind blow to me and to my family.

[9:37] Emily Mann: My sister didn't know.

[9:39] Emily Mann: Oh, really?

[9:39] Emily Mann: Yeah, and by the time you told me my mother had died, so I hadn't gotten a chance to ask her.

[9:47] Emily Mann: So that was huge.

[9:48] Alexis Greene: So you there were a number of things I read in the biography I realized I had remembered incorrectly.

[9:56] Emily Mann: So in the end, I realized she knows more of the truth about me than I know about myself.

[10:02] Alexis Greene: One of the most beautiful things you ever said to me was your description of how you found refuge in the theater.

[10:09] Alexis Greene: And I'm reading a bit from page 45 of the biography.

[10:13] Alexis Greene: Sitting nearly 15 years later in her office at the McCarna Theater, Mann reflected on the tumult during which she came of age.

[10:20] Alexis Greene: Quote, "I no longer trusted or believed in the government. I didn't believe we were doing the right things in the world. I questioned authority at almost every turn. I found refuge in the theater. That's where I kept saying it saved my life. I would have been out on the street, but I wasn't. I was in theater. Theater gave me a place to put all these feelings and this sense of mission and this sense of idealism and the need to connect and create and make change."

[10:55] David Rigano: Yeah.

[10:56] David Rigano: It always seemed to me that you defied so many assumptions about being a woman in the theater, about being the director as a woman in the theater, a playwright, leading a theater, and which is why I saw you as a rebel.

[11:13] Emily Mann: Uh-huh.

[11:14] David Rigano: Do you think that women in the theater today still need to be rebellion?

[11:18] Emily Mann: I think we all have to be rebellion.

[11:20] Emily Mann: Do women need to be? Absolutely.

[11:22] Emily Mann: We've come a long way.

[11:24] Emily Mann: When I was graduating from college, I was at Harvard University, and we had basically no theater program.

[11:33] Emily Mann: What it was was the Log Drama Center.

[11:36] Emily Mann: This is where we all went to do, you know, sort of extracurriculars.

[11:41] Emily Mann: But in fact, it was the first theater I ran.

[11:44] Emily Mann: It had an experimental theater and a main stage, and there was a Harvard Dramatic Club that ran them both, programmed them both, and I was writing and directing and acting for a full four years and doing almost nothing else except during what was called reading period, suddenly reading all the books I was supposed to be reading.

[12:04] Emily Mann: And never took a class before 11 o'clock in the morning.

[12:08] Emily Mann: So I was basically living in the theater.

[12:11] Emily Mann: And when it came to graduating, there was a group of us that were still in the theater and film.

[12:18] Emily Mann: We were trying to decide whether to go to the East Coast, like to New York and start your freelance, or go to Yale Drama School or something like that, or go to the West Coast and make movies.

[12:30] Emily Mann: And I went up to then the head of the little drama center and said, "What should I do?"

[12:36] Emily Mann: And he said, "Oh my dear, you may be quite talented, but I should have told you earlier that women can't direct or write in the American theater professionally. You should think about children's theater."

[12:50] Mark-Eugene Garcia: Yes.

[12:51] Mark-Eugene Garcia: And so that's how it was for women when I was coming up and out.

[12:56] Emily Mann: And when I looked at Yale, and you know Bob Brewsting just passed, so I don't want to say anything negative, except that the truth is that Meadow left Yale School of Drama because basically Brewsting felt that no woman should direct plays.

[13:19] Emily Mann: And so when I reached out to the one woman who was in the directing program who was Lynn, she said, "Don't come here." She left, came to New York and started her own theater. She said that was the only way she'd be able to work. So I thought, oh, maybe I won't go there. And then when I looked at the West Coast and AFI and all that, there was this sense that women didn't direct. And so I applied to the University of Minnesota, Michael, for that reason, to the Bush Fellowship for the Bush Fellowship, where you went to the university, no bills. They gave you a $10,000 talking, which was like a million dollars, and you then apprenticed for um a year at the Guthrie Theater, which sounded perfect to me.

And you got your equity card as a stage manager, and then blah blah blah. So I decided not to go to the West Coast or the East Coast, but in fact go to what I considered to be one of the greatest theaters in America, the Guthrie Theater. I got there, and the artistic director said, "Well, you know, women can't direct professionally in this country, so why don't you think about acting?" I said, "No." I got in as a director. I'm going, that's what I want to do. He said, "Well, you're the first woman to do it." I said, "I know. And I'm doing it." And he said, "Well, you'll have to audition." So he had me audition. He said, "Oh, you're really quite good, you know. And you should be an actress." I said, "I don't want to be an actress."

And he said he realized he had to give it to me, so he did, and then he persecuted me for the whole first year I was there. But I learned, and I did direct there, and I did start the second theater there. And looking, there's another friend of mine from those days, Carl Mother, and um, and I directed my first play there, Anullah at Guthrie II, and I went on to become the first woman to draw on the Guthrie Main Stage finally. Not because of Michael, he was he left, but Alvin Epstein, the most wonderful man, who came to take over as artistic director and saw my work at Guthrie II and me on the main stage, and that was what launched me.

[15:40] David Rigano: Yes, I mean it's rather remarkable. Uh you directed the Glass Menagerie in 1979, and you were the first woman to direct on the main stage at the Guthrie Theatre, which had been founded in 1963. From 1963 to 1979, no woman directed on I mean, you know, what were people thinking? Leads me into just a couple of questions about Tennessee Williams. You had also directed something last summer back at the Low in 1971, and conduction of Glass Menagerie got rave reviews in Minneapolis. And you're now directing out of the iguana, not far from here.

[16:29] Emily Mann: That's right. And so I was wondering if you could talk a bit about what you see in Night of the Iguana. You know, what the play means to you. What are its themes, maybe? I don't know how to leap into such a big question, but I can tell you that this happened to me with the four plays of uh Chekhov. Also, each one of them hit me at different points in my life, and I went, oh, that's what that play is about. And the same thing happened with Tennessee and Glass Menagerie first off, and then it was Kat in a hot tin roof, and then it was streetcar. I just like bing bing bing. I understood them, and I never warmed to iguana until Jean Licti, who is the artistic director of La Femme, who's producing Iguana, asked me to do a zoom of it during the pandemic.

And she had seen an interview I'd done with Dylan McDermott, who had done Glass Menagerie with me, and also Baby Doll with me at the McArthur, who's my sort of Tennessee Williams buddy, and then he played Shannon, and I asked Felicia Rashad to play Maxine, and Jean was playing uh Hannah, and Austin Pendleton was playing Nono. And I and I I just read it and I heard them. And I heard Leah Delaria, even though she didn't do the Zoom, she's doing it now, Mrs. Ms. Fellows. And she's blowing the play apart. You have got to see what she's doing. I just heard the play. I read it, I burst into tears. Maybe because it was about isolation, and we were in a state of isolation. It was about loneliness and breaking through the barricades that we build around ourselves, or where we need to get past in order to connect with other people, which is what Tennessee is always writing about, right?

But it suddenly hit me. And also it takes place on a precipice. And we I felt like the country was on a precipice. I feel like we're on an even higher precipice now. And so the play just became more and more resonant to this moment in time and to my psyche. I don't know how else to put it. And I heard the voices, I heard the people.

[19:08] Emily Mann: For me, it just completely turned me off the play. I hated the people. And then I was reading in John Lawrence's book that they were all plastered when they were doing it. I knew John Houston was drunk. Burton was roaring drunk on the set, and between takes drinking more. And all he did was roar his way through it. You know, who are these people and why should I care about them? And then I read it on the page, and there's it's such an intimate play. It's such a loving play. There's so much love in it. There wasn't an ounce of love in the movie. And I went, oh, this is the Tennessee I knew and met and fell in love with. And so I felt the need to do it. And the cast gets it, it's all stripped down to this sheet of rock covered with planks of rotting wood, overlooking the sea and the sky.

And it's this narrow, dangerous space where people are finding a way past their own isolation and craziness and pain. It's so beautiful. Some of the best of his writing ever. And it's gorgeously constructed. I mean, and not all his plays are. I mean, they, you know, Kat is not well constructed. It isn't. Last Menagerie has got a weak first act. I mean, you know, there's a lot of issues with Tennessee. This one, in my opinion, is totally works.

[20:48] Mark-Eugene Garcia: Um, what are you doing? Are you doing something uh with your direction that's different from previous productions?

[20:56] Emily Mann: Well, a lot of it's in the casting. I mean, Daphne Ruben Vega is playing Maxine. I've got a native bore, I mean, first language Spanish speaking people playing the Spanish guys. You notice in the movie, it was like so offensive, they're all with their mariachis going like this, and they're I mean they're real people, and they're speaking a lot of Spanish, which we put into the play. The Germans are native German speakers, they're Nazis, and there's nothing. I mean, they're often played as cartoons. We are not doing that. Um so already with Maxine being Latina, and we've got a lot going on, right? Um Shannon is Tim Daly, and he's an extremely subtle actor, not a roarer at all. And Leah Delaria, you know, this was when it premiered, you played it as this woman doesn't know that she's a lesbian.

And I have Leah Delaria playing the part. So she comes on, I mean, and her hair is like this, and she comes on like as Tennessee said, it's a diesel-driven truck, and she just comes, she's hilarious, and then she's so scary and wonderful. Um I'm just I'm I'm doing what he wrote, but I don't think we've seen that in any of the productions I've seen, either on film or television or in you know, different revivals I've seen. Everyone's had their own way in, but this is my way in, and it seems to be what he wrote, and it's hilarious. So rarely the humor is very rarely seen, but I find Tennessee hysterically funny. Remember Barbara Brynn and Carlotta Wright? Very funny, Amanda, and yet broke your heart. Um, this is very funny, and I think Tennessee was funny. And you could almost hear Tennessee in the back cackling.

[23:05] Mark-Eugene Garcia: So I'm rambling, sorry.

[23:08] Emily Mann: No, not at all. You were an actor.

[23:11] Mark-Eugene Garcia: Yeah, but not really.

[23:14] Emily Mann: What do you mean not really?

[23:16] Emily Mann: I mean, I am an I am an actor. I mean, I I write from that base and I direct from that base.

[23:24] Mark-Eugene Garcia: Yeah.

[23:25] Emily Mann: Well, that was actually going to be my question.

[23:27] Mark-Eugene Garcia: Yeah.

[23:27] Emily Mann: How does have being an actor impact on your directing and your your writing of plays?

[23:37] Emily Mann: Well, I'm looking at uh a few people I've directed in the room here, and um it's almost like you'd want to ask them, but I I I'm in every moment with that. So I've been told. I mean, I know I am, but I've worked on not making faces and I wraping madly in the chair. Um but yeah, I I connect very deeply to whatever the actor is doing, then I can talk in a way that makes sense, I think, to actors. So, like Tim Daly said to me today, oh thank God you understand why I can't do that. And it was like I looked at him, and there was, you know, when you can see someone is awkward with an idea or what a stage direction tells you to do, it's not at all where they're going. It's like clearly we're not gonna do that because you're not comfortable.

I mean, I understand how actors work, let's put it that way. And I love working with actors, and actors to me, uh, when I truly understand a play, is when I hear it with actors who know what they're doing. And that's why I like to direct the premieres of my plays, because once I hear actors saying the words, and I know that yes, that is the tension I had, and guide them into what I want, thought I wanted, I see whether it works or not. And if it doesn't, I can rewrite it or either on the spot, which I often do, right? Or I say, I'll go home and talk to the writer and I come back with something. Um, but like when we did the pianist, we worked on it off and on for six years with pretty much the same company, so that I got to write for them.

[25:28] Emily Mann: Well, I was thinking uh listening to you, that writing what's been called theater of testimony when you interview uh people and listen to them talk and incorporate that into a play. But I don't know what's gonna lift into becoming drama and theater until I actually hear it for sure. Okay. So for example, when I was working on having our say, which is about two African-American women, both over under, I didn't do all of those interviews. A woman named Amy Hill Harth did it, and she had culled them into um a book. I did some interviews with them, but it wasn't until I sat down with Mary Alice and Gloria Foster, the two actors doing it, that I came in with like a hundred pages that I was going to come get down to like 35 or 40, and I could see what just lay there, what sparked, what didn't, and then I could work minutes. I was working with all that material to to get the juiciest and most dramatic stuff.

[26:33] Emily Mann: And so again, it's actors tell me whether there's a chemical combustion in the air or not. And that's when also, you know, you know you have the right actor. We've had a couple of wrong actors. But then a couple of right actors, and one in particular, who made me realize, yes, this is the play. You've been mentioning the pianist. In 1977, I believe your first professionally produced play was Anula Allen, the autobiography of her survivor. And Anula Allen was a Holocaust survivor and, right, Holocaust survivor, but not camp survivor, right, right, right. Yes. And most recently, the pianist, your newest play, which was just produced at the George Street Playhouse in New Brunswick, New Jersey. The pianist is and was inspired by, and I can never pronounce his first name.

Say Spielmann. Okay. What a schwab. Yeah, thank you. Spielmann's diary of his surviving the Holocaust in Warsaw. Yeah. And so nearly 50 years separate these plays. I'm curious as to what the connections have been for you.

[27:53] Emily Mann: Well, one is sitting right there, Michael Wolk, who was with me at the University of Minnesota when I did Anula first with Barbara Brynn. And 43 years later, I got a phone call from Michael saying, I've been keeping track of you. I don't know if you know what I've been doing, but I have the stage rights to the pianist, the memoir, and my colleagues, and I think you should write this stage play, stage adaptation of it. He had remembered Anula. So it does come full circle in a bizarre way. And my first thought was I can't do another Holocaust piece. I just cannot do it. It puts me into such a dark and crazy place. Also, my mother's whole family was wiped out in Poland. So I remember saying to my husband, Gary, I said, you know, I'm not, I can't do this, I can't do this.

And he just looked at me. Because whenever I say I can't do something, he was, you're gonna do it. He's telling me you're gonna do it. And in fact, I read the memoir, it blew my mind. And also one of the reasons I thought I couldn't do it was the movie of the pianist is a great work of art. It is an extraordinary movie, and I thought, what can I bring to this that Polanski didn't? And that movie didn't, and then it was when I read the memoir I realized what the theater can do that film can't, and vice versa. I mean, Polanski, all the huge, he's very faithful to the memoir, and I am too, except that I brought in the family hugely, and he's not in the memoir very much. But what he was able to do is show the ghetto, show the horrors that happened to people and often to the murder of children and all of that.

And I didn't want to do that. I'm gonna I thought I can do it all through the eyes of Spielmann, seeing it, experiencing it, telling us about it in a way that you can only do in the theater. And then I could break the fourth wall the way I often do in my plays, so that's direct address, so that you will feel directly from him what it was like, and do it in a way that we never see a murder. You know, when we hear about the child, I mean, except pointing at Jordan, we do see the man thrown out of the window. We of course don't see him fall, we hear the scream, and then to black out so we can imagine it, and then there's a shadow that comes across the stage in slow motion, which you probably don't even know is happening, but it was the body falling, but in an abstraction, and the audience would gasp every time.

But we didn't see it in the movie you see it, and it's another moment you don't forget, but in the play you could do it in a different way. But when he talks about that little boy who's just shot at the checkpoint, you just hear a distant shot and you watch the actor deal with watching a child die in front of his arms. That's what the theater can do.

[31:36] Alexis Greene: I'm curious, did you have any talkbacks at George Street?

[31:40] Emily Mann: Oh my gosh, many, many, many, yeah. Because unfortunately, we are experiencing an incredible horrific amount of anti-Semitism, both in this country and around the world. Yes. And in addition to what is the war that is going on now in the Middle East. Yeah. Well, the difference between the play and the talkbacks before October 7th and after October 7th, the difference was profound, as you can imagine. The leading man had lived many years in Israel, and his brother and mother still lived there. And so one of his friends had been, a girlfriend had been abducted. So I mean it was very real, and how to go on stage was really hard for the company. But they did it. And it was deeply appreciated by the audience.

And then took a moment of silence for first it was for those who had been massacred in southern Israel, and then it became for all those in a sense who were dying. It's so hard to talk about what's going on right now. There is not a Jewish person anywhere in the world that isn't wrestling with this right now on some profound level. But I think the play is even more important now because it also sparks, I think, a very healthy conversation about anti-Semitism that has to be had. And I hope we'll be able to continue it. But it goes beyond that. It goes beyond what happens when you make anyone the other, and the brutality of what human beings are capable of, the madness. It seems to me a very important topic, if you will, to explore or lead into how can we use theater to connect, to make change.

[33:44] Emily Mann: Yes. It was very interesting in these after play discussions because at first it was so many people who came, if there was a big Jewish audience, and correct me if I'm wrong, but there were people weeping, just openly weeping every night at the show. And part of it was for family that they had lost. Many of them were, you know, had roots in the Holocaust on one generation or another. And then after October 7th, almost everyone in the Jewish audience, but not only the Jewish audience, had a friend, either friend or family who had been directly affected by October 7th, or had friends whose kids were going into the army, or they had friends who were going into the army, or they were reservists or whatever.

There was a direct connection to Israel. Then I found it interesting that so many of the Black audience that had been there previous to October 7th were very, very moved by it and took, you know, understood it on a personal level, found their own oppression and upset, and then after the 7th were wrestling with how they felt about the response. But that was also very interesting to talk about, how complex it was. So all of this was, I think, a way to make a forum for people to talk about things that were at the front of their minds, not the back, but the front of their minds. And that's theater at its best. I mean, that's why I write what I write and do what I do.

[35:38] Alexis Greene: Just going back a little bit, you wrote Execution of Dust, which is one of my favorite plays of New York.

[35:44] Emily Mann: Oh, yes. Very strong and fierce. It was produced in Louisville, then in Arena Stage, and ultimately you directed it in Minneapolis, then you directed it on Broadway here in 1986. And it had unfortunately a very short run.

[36:05] Alexis Greene: Brutal.

[36:06] Emily Mann: Yes, brutally short. Subsequently, you gave an interview, essentially said to him that playwrights should go to the regional theaters, the theaters beyond New York.

[36:19] Alexis Greene: Oh, I know the quote you're talking about.

[36:22] Emily Mann: Yes. To avoid New York as long as you can. It's in our nonprofit theater circuit around this country, you said.

[36:35] Alexis Greene: Well, I don't disagree with myself.

[36:41] Emily Mann: I do think the National Theater in America is in the not-for-profit theaters all over this country. I think that's our national theater. And then there are some theaters in New York that should be and often shirk their duty in being the National Theater and they're in New York. And they usually the not-for-profits. The not-for-profit theater movement or the National Theater feeds Broadway. Everyone knows this and always has. And once touring stopped, that's how it happened. Now we're in a real dilemma because of many factors. At the end of the day, we're still in a very old-fashioned system that says, unless you have your play on Broadway, you're not a success. As a playwright, you don't necessarily own your own work if you have underlying rights happening.

There's all kinds of things you won't get published. So often you have to get on Broadway to assure the longevity of a work. So sadly, a lot of our best work gets lost. That's been true for a very long time. But as you know, I was doing it and August Wilson was doing it, got our work in theaters all around the country, and then when it was ready to go to Broadway, we did it.

[38:36] Emily Mann: They sit there and they decide what after years and years of work, whether your theater, your play will have a life or not. You know, often it's one person. It's idiotic. And I think that's what I was responding to. There's definitely a way forward. No question about it. And I think a lot of smart minds are at work trying to figure it out. The pandemic was an absolute catastrophe for many, many theaters around the country. There's just no getting it harder. Yeah. Yeah. So you have a closure for two years. Some people were very smart about how they kept in touch with their donors and with their audiences. And they did Zoom things, and they did, you know, they sent things to their supporters and audiences, and others just sort of hibernated.

The ones that hibernated are having a very hard time now trying to get them back. It was a big, big mistake for those people who took a real hiatus. For me, if I had still been running a theater, I would have taken it as a great opportunity to do a whole lot of virtual work, to do a whole lot of commissioning, to do a whole lot of getting new work in the pipeline in order to, when we weren't going to reopen, hit with all guns blazing.

[39:58] Emily Mann: Thank God I didn't have to do it. I stopped after the right time. It took a lot of bravery, would have taken a lot of energy, but I think those people who did do that are going to be back on their feet. We are gonna come back. There's no question about it. It's been three years since you moved from getting theater to rejoining the freelance.

[40:20] Alexis Greene: The human race.

[40:21] Emily Mann: The human race. How do you feel? Ah God, I love it. Oh my god, it's great. I have never felt more creative and alive and happy. I mean, I love lifting the institutional burdens off my shoulders. I've written two new pieces. I'm directing, you know, and I directed the pianist, and now I'm directing week one. I'm just in heaven. I love it. And I love being back in full gear.

[41:03] David Rigano: Should we ask if there are any questions?

[41:05] Alexis Greene: Claire.

[41:07] Claire: Now that you've left them with Carter, how would you go about spearheading something?

[41:14] Emily Mann: Yeah, we want it to spearhead something. You mean a project? Well, that's a very good question because pretty soon I have to do that. It's harder, I have to say when I would had a project that was ready, I would just say to the artistic staff and McArthur, do you agree with me that this piece is ready? And if they did, then we do it if they didn't say, you know, you should get a workshop, you're not ready. I would listen to the staff right now. I'm like, oh, who do I go to? Who do I call? And it's hard. I mean, I'm dealing with the reality of how hard it is to get a production going, how hard it is. I mean, since the pandemic, there's such a backlog, because it's two years of having to stop, and now there's, you know, there's this incredible backlog that's very daunting to get past.

I guess I'll tell you when I know. I mean, I'm still doing, I mean, the piano says a commission from six years ago, and we're still involved with, you know, what his future will be, but we had George Street, as you well know, you since you did it. Burkshears took my musical right away. We don't know what the next step is there, and Iguana just is what it is, which is lovely. Um so I'm looking for my next project. I don't know what it is, what I'm gonna write, what I'm gonna direct, any ideas on the open um and I'll see. I mean, I'm back in the freelance world, so I'm not in control the way I was. It's daunting.

[43:10] Alexis Greene: Hi.

[43:11] Claire: Hi. So much of what you said resonated with me, particularly um being told no, because you're a woman, and uh and the political framework and your commitment to making change through your work is admirable. As um a woman of a certain age, I would like you to talk about ageism and whether you know you think about creating roles for women my age.

[43:47] Emily Mann: Yes, and that's what the musical was about. It's about falling in love in your 70s, and she's the center.

[43:54] Alexis Greene: Thank you.

[43:54] Emily Mann: You're welcome. Can it can it not be a musical?

[43:58] Alexis Greene: I know, right?

[44:00] Emily Mann: I have a question. As a writer and director, from a writer and director, how do you sort of compartmentalize the two jobs, either particularly when you are doing both, or if you sit down and you think I don't think I'm gonna be the director on this one. I know I have to be the director on this thing that I'm writing. Uh, and with I want to direct this play that I didn't write, how how do you sort of work the Venn diagram of those two roles?

[44:33] Emily Mann: You know, it's such a good question, and in a way, I don't make a distinction. When I go in to direct Night of the Iguana, for example, I know it so well. I want to know it as well as if Tennessee were in the room with me and I'd written it with him, if you know what I mean. It's like there's no division between what I feel the writer's intention is and what I'm directing. Why I like directing my world premieres is because so often directors don't get what I'm doing, which is what happened this past summer when I didn't direct the musical. There's full half of that play is not what I intended. And that happened to me on um another play of mine. So at least if I direct the um the premiere, I know if a moment isn't working or this isn't working.

I ask myself, is it the writing? Is it the acting? Is it the directing? Is it this staging? What is it? And I can try to fix it to make it work. And I have people around me who are very rigorous giving me notes. And if you're sitting there as a writer, and I was just speaking to a writer upstairs who had a similar problem with a director who didn't get it. I don't know if you've had.

[46:07] Alexis Greene: Right.

[46:07] Emily Mann: And so I'm I don't know if I'm more of a director than a playwright or more of a playwright than a director. And when you ask me, it's whatever I'm doing at the moment, right? Um it's very hard for me to sit in a room where someone is directing a scene completely wrong or not what was intended.

[46:33] Alexis Greene: I see there's a lot of there's a lot of heads nodding.

[46:33] Emily Mann: A lot of heads nodding here.

[46:39] Alexis Greene: Yeah.

[46:40] Emily Mann: I'm not in on that secret.

[46:42] Alexis Greene: Yeah.

[46:44] Emily Mann: Yes, honey.

[46:45] Claire: Why couldn't Daniel take off the coat?

[46:49] Emily Mann: Oh, such a good question. He asked me why the leading man in uh the pianist, Daniel, uh, who's such a beautiful actor and such a truthful actor and such an easy to actor to direct? Um, I kept trying to get him to take off the Nazis, a great coat that he was wearing. Um because he has a what he gets shot at, and nearly he finally survives the war, the liberation comes, and he runs out. I don't know, maybe you saw it in the movie, you're gonna see the play, and they start shooting at him because the polls because they think he's a he's a he's a German, he's a Nazi, right? He's no, no, I'm a poll, I'm a pole. This you know, we're just wearing this coat. Well, most people would then take off the coat, right?

As he went off to um to walk around the city, and um for some reason Daniel couldn't take off the coat. Um as a director and of the writer, I was trying to say, okay, he says he starts the um a monologue, the final monologue of play saying, you know, in his coat, it's not supposed to be as good as this, I can finally, after six years, I can finally walk around my city without fear because um uh peace had come. But he couldn't take off the coat. I got a note from Michael saying, How he's gotta take the coat off. My husband said, Gotta take the coat off. I'm going, Daniel, you've got to take the coat off. Why would you you're gonna get shot again? He went. I can't take the coat off. He said I feel like an idiot taking the I said, okay.

And then he later says, but how can I go on living? I know I have to go on living, but how can I go on living? But all I have is death around me. And then he took off the coat. And I thought, that's very poetic, and it's rather nice. But in fact, you're gonna get shot before you say that line, right? Again. So he couldn't do it, he couldn't do it, he couldn't do it. And finally, the last week of the run, I saw him go, and he took the coat off and he put it over his arm. And then he dropped it on the death line. He dropped the coat. But sometimes you get, I mean, he couldn't find the truth of it, and he would never do anything that he couldn't find the truth of. And I love actors like that. Even though he couldn't do it. He couldn't do something that felt ball, and it the penny hadn't dropped. But when the penny dropped finally, were you there when he finally did it? Were you happy?

[49:27] Claire: I was, yeah.

[49:29] Emily Mann: That was what you were referring to, right?

[49:32] Claire: White Dadrew.

[49:36] Emily Mann: And in a play, you can do that. As opposed to a movie or another.

[49:41] Alexis Greene: Yes.

[49:42] Emily Mann: Another show. You keep growing. You keep growing. It's a living organism. It keeps growing.

[49:46] Alexis Greene: Yeah.

[49:47] Emily Mann: Um indeed. But also when I'm directing, I love actors. I mean, I know I understood. I mean, I didn't understand the mission gossip why you couldn't. But I understood he couldn't, and I honored it. I mean, and then he found it. I mean, I really believe I can't stand a fake moment on stage. It makes my skin crawl, quite frankly. And we see a lot of it. And I'm not interested in it. So I'll go with the actor however they need to find it.

[50:20] Alexis Greene: It's interesting because I I think some directors would have said you have to take on this word, you take the coat off, right?

[50:27] Emily Mann: Yeah.

[50:27] Alexis Greene: Yeah.

[50:28] Emily Mann: There are most most directors who I just he couldn't do it. I I had to cherish that in a way.

[50:38] Alexis Greene: When everything else.

[50:46] Emily Mann: But you have to say thank you so quickly.

[50:46] Alexis Greene: Thank you.

[50:54] David Rigano: As always, incredible.

[50:56] Alexis Greene: Yeah.

[50:56] David Rigano: I love hearing artists tell their story.

[51:00] Alexis Greene: And hers was awesome.

[51:00] David Rigano: Yeah, and and when especially when they have a story like that.

[51:04] Alexis Greene: My gosh.

[51:04] David Rigano: So, David, what do we have next week?

[51:06] David Rigano: Coming up next week, we have Sincerely Held Beliefs by Bambi Everson.

[51:11] Alexis Greene: Oh, fantastic.

[51:13] David Rigano: And uh this was this was one that we did with uh Jay Michaels.

[51:19] Alexis Greene: Yes, who is one of our partners in putting these events together, Jay Michaels Global Communication.

[51:24] David Rigano: And he and Bambi together kind of moderated. I was so glad. I'll talk more about this next week. I was so glad that I wasn't moderating this one because she brought some actors in to read a scene from it, and I literally had to walk away because she was crying.

[51:44] Alexis Greene: Yeah, you walked to the back.

[51:45] David Rigano: I walked to the back of the store to I had to step away because I was crying over the the topic. So I'm very glad that I wasn't seated up there with them. She's such a prolific writer, and she's she's written stuff that ranges from fun, silly murder mysteries to very difficult looks at people with differences in their sincerely held beliefs.

[52:15] Alexis Greene: Yeah, she has quite a presence on our shelves. We have we have a lot of Bambi's work here, and frequently signed.

[52:20] David Rigano: So don't forget to follow us on Instagram at Drama Book Show Podcast to see images from the show and see what's coming up next.

[52:26] David Rigano: And follow our eventbrite by clicking events at dramabookshop.com to find out how to be a part of our live audience.

[52:33] David Rigano: Remember, all of the books we talk about can be found at the drama bookshop. And so can we. So we'll see you at the bookshop.