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[0:00] Tonya Pinkins: Good afternoon, Broadway Podcast Network. My name is Tonya Pinkins. My pronouns are Diva and Goddess. And you are listening to You Can't SAY THAT. We gotta speak to life. We gotta say what News for you. Can't tell us real.

[0:33] Tonya Pinkins: My guest today could we could say an old friend, an old colleague, but we're not old. But um I worked with them on the first professional play I ever did, and that would be about gosh, I feel like it's like 40 years ago, with the brilliant Larry Kramer. It was a play called Just Say No. It was about one of our other demon presidents, Ronald Reagan. It was during the uh AIDS HIV epidemic, and he has been a stage manager. Uh he staged managed that very, very challenging production. And now he has a new book out called HOLD PLEASE, Stage Managing a Pandemic. So uh please welcome Richard Hester.

[1:26] Richard Hester: Hi, Tonya. How are you?

[1:28] Tonya Pinkins: I'm divine. Where are you in the world?

[1:31] Richard Hester: I am in St. Louis, Missouri. And I hate to correct you, but we actually worked together on A My Name is Alice.

[1:39] Tonya Pinkins: We didn't do Just Say No together?

[1:42] Richard Hester: We didn't do Just Say No together.

[1:43] Tonya Pinkins: Oh my God. Well, I do remember you at A My Name is Alice, but I felt like A My Name is Alice was after Just Say No.

[1:45] Richard Hester: A My Name is Alice.

[1:53] Tonya Pinkins: Oh wow, that was a show too. Were you there before me, or did you come in the middle?

[1:57] Richard Hester: I I was there for the whole thing. So you you came in uh uh I don't even remember how far into it, but I came in. Um Elena Reed was still there, what was that other one? Yvette or Yvonne or it was Jackie.

[2:08] Richard Hester: Oh yeah, Jack Jack Hay was there. Oh I uh Lorraine Sarabian, Lorraine Sarabian, Donna Murphy was in for a minute, Randy Graf, Suzanne Douglas, Kate must have come after me. Charlene Ward was there before Annie Golden came in for a bit. I don't think I was there with Annie. It was literally like every amazing Broadway diva went through that show before they were they were sort of divas in training.

[2:45] Tonya Pinkins: Yeah, it's a great show, it plays well, it plays for everybody. Man, why do I have this memory of you on on, I mean, I have whole stories of you on Just Say No. Okay, so that's all a lie. False memory syndrome is real.

[3:01] Richard Hester: So uh have we not worked together since A My Name is Alice?

[3:05] Tonya Pinkins: I feel like we have.

[3:06] Richard Hester: I feel like we have, but I honestly don't think we have. I know you've worked with Michael, my husband at Atlantic.

[3:12] Tonya Pinkins: The right, but I don't know that you and I have. We've seen each other on and off. We I feel like we've worked together so many times. I guess A My Name is Alice just put a groove in there. So you've been stage managing for how many years?

[3:28] Richard Hester: 40.

[3:30] Tonya Pinkins: 40 flipping years.

[3:33] Richard Hester: 40 years.

[3:35] Tonya Pinkins: And why? Why did you become a stage manager?

[3:37] Richard Hester: I like bossing people around.

[3:41] Tonya Pinkins: Really? You don't seem like a bossy person to me. I've never thought of you in that way, but okay, now I know the truth.

[3:49] Richard Hester: I the I early on wanted to be an actor. And I just didn't have the skills, honestly. And I was working as a stage manager as my day job while I was sort of pretending to act and going to Bill Esper's acting class and all of that.

[4:06] Tonya Pinkins: You studied with Bill?

[4:08] Richard Hester: I did.

[4:08] Tonya Pinkins: And in the mid uh oh my god, this must be 1983. Wait a minute. So who told you you couldn't be an actor? You or did someone tell you that? Because Bill can make anybody be an actor.

[4:21] Richard Hester: I studied with Bill too. Well, and Bill was amazing. I mean, he really was good. But I I think what I saw was that I wasn't willing to go to the place that you need to go to as an actor. And interestingly, I'm now finding that I can go to that place when I'm writing where I couldn't do that as an actor.

[4:45] Richard Hester: And I kind of probably hid as a stage manager a bit because then it didn't have to be about me. I could help other people tell their stories. I could facilitate everybody else doing what they were doing. And it was safer.

[4:59] Tonya Pinkins: So if what you're telling me is true, Bill must have been in your ass on the regular.

[5:06] Richard Hester: Well, you know, we we're we were I I remember doing sort of all these exercises, and I was still very conflicted about being gay. I I wasn't remotely in touch with myself emotionally, and we'd have to do all these emotional exercises, and they just sort of traumatized me.

[5:28] Tonya Pinkins: Yeah, because Bill's class, like people get divorced, they you know stop speaking to people like Bill's class, it gets you to your authentic self and changes your life.

[5:38] Richard Hester: So you were like, you were like, nah, I don't want to do that. I'm gonna go on the other side.

[5:42] Tonya Pinkins: Yeah, and I I kind of figured out my authentic self by myself. I kind of it took a couple of decades, but I ultimately sort of figured it out.

[5:53] Tonya Pinkins: Well, how did that happen?

[5:55] Richard Hester: Well, I I think I spend a lot of time running scenarios in my head, and I'll run them over and over and over again, kind of fantasy scenarios. Uh you know, sometimes they're revenge uh against you know something that's happened, and sometimes they're just sort of this is what I want to do, how do I do it? And and kind of imagining myself being in charge of something or imagining myself, you know, winning an award or whatever that is, and what would I do and how would I feel about it?

[6:29] Richard Hester: And I I spend a lot of time by myself from choice. I genuinely am happy with my own company, and I love like a long car drive or a very long walk, and so I'll just sort of live through that. And I think over the course of my life, I have in those sort of sessions with myself, if you will, I've kind of defined who I was that way in a way that I'm not sure I could have done if I actually sat down to define myself.

[6:59] Tonya Pinkins: So, who are some of the famous people you've stage managed?

[7:04] Richard Hester: Well, aside from Tonya Pinkins. Because you know, we know stage managing is really a lot of managing personalities. Not just actors, directors, choreographers, they're all, you know, those kinds of personalities. So tell us some of the names.

[7:21] Richard Hester: Well, Bernadette Peters, Patti LuPone, Mandy Patinkin, Elaine Stritch, George Grisard, Rosemary Harris. I've been in rooms with Harold Pinter, Edward Albee. I've worked with incredible directors like Julie Taymor, Graziella Danielle, Sam Mendes, Nick Hytner, Des McAnuff, and all of them, I'm not gonna say that all of them are difficult at all, because they're actually not. What they are is people who know what they want. And some people find that difficult because they won't, none of those people will be happy with anything less than perfection.

[8:08] Richard Hester: And they may never achieve it, but they want everyone around them to at least be on that path with them. And my feeling is if I'm doing a Patti LuPone concert, Patti's in charge. I'm hired because I'm good at what I do. I'm not hired because it's going to be easy. Weirdly, stage managing Patti LuPone is as easy as it gets because she is crystal clear about what she wants. I know when I'm right, I know when I'm wrong. There's no gray area. Give me that any time.

[8:38] Tonya Pinkins: Tell me what it is you do that you're so good at.

[8:41] Richard Hester: Okay, well, here's a story. Carolyn Lagerfeld, a friend of both of ours. I did a play with her at CSC Repertory down on 11th Street back in the day. And I didn't know Carolyn very well at all. And if this was a play called Phaedra Botanica, which was all in verse, it was intense. And there was a scene where Richard Reely, another actor in the show, came in covered with blood. He'd been mauled by a tiger or something. So there was like very gory and very it was set in British India. So I'm in the booth and I've got my headphones on and I can hear my assistant backstage. And my assistant was terrified of Carolyn. Terrified of her.

[9:20] Richard Hester: For good reason. Because yeah, exactly. With very good reason. So anytime Carolyn would get upset about something, she'd just quietly turn on her microphone so I could hear what was going on and figure out how to deal with it. So we had a performance, and I had no way into Carolyn. I couldn't figure out how to work with her. And we were fine. I mean, we did the show. So we did this performance where there was a photographer taking pictures, which we knew about. We knew it was happening. Carolyn comes off stage at the end of the show and says, I don't know what the fuck they think I'm going to be able to do with that photographer going on. So disrespectful, I can't concentrate. I want the ears of that photographer on a plate. And stormed off into her dressing room and wouldn't come out.

[10:09] Richard Hester: So I was sitting in the booth and I happened to be eating an orange. And I thought, okay, I made two ear-shaped things out of orange peel. I put them on a plate. I went backstage. I put a whole handful of stage blood over the two ears. I knocked on the door. She said, What? I opened the door, I stuck the plate in, and we were like best friends from then on in. That's why I'm good at what I do.

[10:41] Tonya Pinkins: That is kind of brilliant. That is kind of brilliant right there.

[10:47] Richard Hester: Yes, you made someone laugh. You you took all the tension out of that. That's that's kind of brilliant. That's kind of brilliant. I love that story.

[10:58] Richard Hester: Wow. And you know, honestly, you know, Elaine Stritch, God rest her soul, was out of everyone I've worked with, she it took me a long time to realize that she didn't want problems solved. She wanted the energy of the chaos of unsolved problems to feed her to get on stage.

[11:21] Tonya Pinkins: And that took me a very long time to figure out. So, how did you figure that out? And what was the moment that you realized, oh, I'm not supposed to solve this. Give us a story, since you're so good at telling them.

[11:32] Richard Hester: So, so Elaine had this weird little dressing room off stage. It wasn't even a dressing room, it was a nook that because she and George Brizzard and Rosemary Harris had in their contracts that they all had equal dressing rooms. So they were all on a floor, one floor up. Oh my, it was deep. This was deep. So Elaine, this wasn't a dressing room, but it sort of became one. It was like the offstage bathroom, and it had like a little vestibule, and we put curtains up and whatever. So Elaine never wanted me to knock when I came to collect valuables. She just wanted me to come in. So, because the knocking startled her. So, okay, great. So then I would just start coming in. And then two days later, she said, Oh, you're scaring me.

You know, I didn't hear you coming. And so the next day I thought, okay, well, I can't knock and I can't sneak in on her. So I sort of shuffled my feet outside her door and came in, and she said, Can't you pick up your feet? And I was like, okay, there's clearly no winning here. So I'm just going to change every day and do something different. And that's what I did. And I I got along with her, you know, as well as anybody ever got along with her.

[12:56] Richard Hester: There was one time when I was calling the show from backstage. And you know, for people who are listening who may not know what that is, it's it's every light cue and uh scene change happens because the stage manager says go. And then the person on the lightboard hits hits the cue. So I'm sitting backstage at Delicate Balance and calling the show, and Elaine comes up to me in her bathrobe in the middle of somebody else's scene, and she says, Would you go to Smilers for me and get me a bagel? You're the only one who knows the kind I like. And I said, Elaine, I'm calling the show. And she said, I'm not on for 10 minutes. You've got plenty of time.

[13:36] Tonya Pinkins: Well, my goodness, you sound so creative with how you do your job. Are there stories like this in the book?

[13:44] Richard Hester: Uh there are. There are there's and there's a couple of other Elaine Stritch stories in there as well.

[13:50] Tonya Pinkins: So why'd you decide to write a book?

[13:53] Richard Hester: I didn't decide to write a book, actually. The when the pandemic started on the first day of the shutdown, everybody was kind of in a free fall panic. And I don't, I mean, as you can tell from what we've talked about already, I I'm not someone who kind of can let panic reign. Everyone was posting all sorts of nonsense on um social media, and they were talking about, you know, everyone was scared about different things. And I I kind of thought, okay, hold on a second. This is what's we know. This is actually what we know. All of this other stuff we don't know. We're conjecturing. So stop conjecturing. This is what we know. And if you use common sense and take what we know to the next level, this is, I think, what is going to happen.

[14:37] Richard Hester: And I posted that on, it was like literally the first day. And there was a lot of sort of discussion back and forth on it, comments and stuff like that. And so the next day something else happened, and I posted again. I wrote another thing and posted again. And I just had nothing else to do. I don't, I'm not someone who can sit on the couch and do nothing. So I started writing a two to three thousand word essay every day. That became my job. I just sort of did it. My friend Rick Ellis, who wrote the foreword to the book, said, at what point did you think, oh fuck, I've got to do this every day? And I was like, kind of post number 30. And so that was pretty early. But I realized that people were actually honestly waiting to hear what was going on.

My father had a job writing a newsletter for about chemical engineering. And he would take articles from all over the place, synthesize them so corporations could like get the headlines kind of like Broadway briefing or something like that. You get the headlines of everything that's going on, and if you're interested in that topic, then you read it. I kind of started doing the same thing. And people started reading it, and people started reading it a lot. And I started getting texts from people when it was late. I'm like, hello, where is it? Breakfast is on the table. We need your blog. And I so I was like, okay, I guess that's my job. And then at some point, maybe a hundred in or so. I eventually went down to six days a week instead of seven because it really was I needed a bit of a break.

And on the seventh day, I posted pictures of New York that I had taken as I was walking around. And Rick Sordelay, who's a Broadway fight choreographer. Yes, I know. Also, Rick very strangely has a publishing company called Sortelay Inc. Who knew? So Rick with a novelist named David Blix formed this publishing company, Sortelay Inc. to keep David's own historical fiction work in print. And when they got good at it, started helping first-time writers. And Rick and I just talked, and he said, We want to publish you. We think that you know this is a book. And so I wrote a book, but I did it sort of in weird daily. It was a kind of like I guess it's how Charles Dickens wrote. I don't know how Charles Dickens wrote.

[17:13] Tonya Pinkins: So how did you is the book? Does the book contain the blog that because it seems like you were stage managing the pandemic for the community of people who followed you on Facebook, or is the book your career, or is it a combination of both?

[17:30] Richard Hester: It it's the blog. It's a it's basically a daily journal diary, and it it's every day. I decided that I would stop doing it every day after a solid year. That seemed like a really good place to and I think I was starting to go back to work and it seemed like the end. Little did I know that you know two years after that would still be in the middle of it, but you know, what are you gonna do? So I had about 1400 pages of writing, and the book is about 550 pages long. So I did some judicious editing, and I mean I did a lot of railing against the government in this blog. I mean, a lot of railing, and a lot of it was the same rail. So I kind of tried to rail once about one topic and then move on to something else.

[18:18] Tonya Pinkins: And did you edit yourself?

[18:20] Richard Hester: Yes, yes. Oh it was a lot. I mean, writing it all was one thing. Going back and rereading it several times was another. And then I recorded the audiobook of it and then had to read the whole thing. Actually, I enjoyed doing the audiobook of my book, but rereading myself. It's like I just dumped that out. I don't want to go back and re-ingest it.

[18:46] Tonya Pinkins: Yeah, no, it there is that sort of purging thing. It's like, no, that's supposed to be out.

[18:51] Richard Hester: Exactly. So it sounds like the book was really me stage managing your community. How did you filter in stories from your career? Or did that go into stage managing the community, or is that sort of a stylistic, you're merging things?

[19:10] Richard Hester: I started also writing about what was going on in our house with Michael and our cat, Ziggy.

[19:18] Tonya Pinkins: How did Michael feel about that?

[19:20] Richard Hester: Well, there were a couple times where I he said that's uh that don't write about that. You know, strangely, I found that the more personal I got, the more people enjoyed the blog. Michael, as an actor who puts himself out there, was completely uninterested in his personal life being there. And so I had to learn how to respect those boundaries and not and not get divorced.

[19:43] Tonya Pinkins: And not get divorced, exactly. I mean there's still there were a couple things where he's like, you're saying that? You're talking about that? And I was like, I think it'll be fine. And it I think it all, I don't think ultimately anything ended up in the book that he was really upset about. But I wrote a one of my entries that and this will sort of tie in with how it was going, was about it was after George Floyd, and I was talking about the audition process, and I said in the week that George Floyd was murdered during the uprisings? No, well, no, I mean in in the weeks that followed that.

[20:31] Richard Hester: Got it. So the I I would start sort of examining my own life in light of current events.

[20:38] Tonya Pinkins: Okay.

[20:39] Richard Hester: And so Michael, in the last couple of years, more and more, was the parts that he was auditioning for were going to men of color.

[20:48] Tonya Pinkins: Okay.

[20:49] Richard Hester: And so I started by saying, you know, Michael is losing parts out to men of color. And then I clarified that, and I and I said that as the sort of topic sentence. And then I said, but they're not his parts. They're they're not his parts until he gets cast in them. What's happening is actually that we are expanding our consciousness to allow people who look different to audition for the same roles. And more and more, Michael is still getting the same percentage of work, I think, that he's always got. He's working as much as he ever did or ever didn't. What's happening is that people of color are getting far more opportunities than they've ever had before. So he in quotes lost work to other white performers before.

And now he's losing work, in quotes, to men of color. And the end result of that is isn't that a good thing? Isn't that a thing that we should be celebrating and not worrying about? And so much of what was happening in middle America is people of color are taking my jobs. And they're and my point in this was they weren't your jobs. They were anybody's job, and you just didn't get picked for that job. It wasn't ever your job.

[22:13] Tonya Pinkins: Did you get attacked?

[22:15] Richard Hester: Never did. And I was fascinated to see that in the entire year I never got attacked for anything. And I was really out there, I think, in in some of those. And I was tentative about expressing my opinions at first, and then I sort of got emboldened and just sort of said, I'm gonna put it out there and let you know whoever it was attack me for it.

[22:39] Tonya Pinkins: Well, you know, I never did the most outspoken person there is. I may names out of there. So what was the most outrageous thing you said?

[22:46] Richard Hester: Yeah, I haven't seen the books. You didn't give me the book.

[22:48] Tonya Pinkins: Oh, I'll have to send you a copy.

[22:49] Richard Hester: Please. The the where you felt like, oh my god, I don't know that I can say this. Like the challenge for you personally.

[22:57] Richard Hester: One of the most shameful things in my life was happened when I was a kid in South Africa. And it was a very much of a Master Herald in the boys moment. We lived with my grandfather for a while. And my grandfather had African house servants. And their kids were the same age as my sister and I. And we all played together. This we were five, six, seven, something like that. And I was literally called master. That was my that you know, everyone referred to my grandfather as master, and they called me master. I was a five-year-old kid. I mean, I at the time.

[23:45] Tonya Pinkins: Okay. Okay, like this is like news to me now. Like, oh my god, okay, you're a South African. He's an Africana. Okay, okay, master.

[23:56] Richard Hester: So I had I had all these little toy cars when I was a kid, and we would all play together. And Jablani, who was maybe a year older than I was, could make great roads in the dirt, and we would play cars for hours. We'd play cars in the dirt. So I had this very cheap, crappy, hollow plastic Volkswagen bug. It was literally just a kind of shell with two kind of metal wheels on it. And Jablani came up with the idea. He said, I could make this run, I think. I mean, Jablani was must have been seven or eight. And so he said, I I think I could make this run. And he said, Are you okay if I drill a hole in the side of this car? I was like, Yeah, yeah, yeah. Make it run, make it run. So Jablani starts drilling a hole in the side of the car, and I burst into tears because he was he'd made a hole in the side of the car.

And and it was much harder to get into the plastic, I think, than Jablani ever thought. I went inside and told on Jablani, knowing that I had told him it was okay, and knowing that whatever Jablani said, they would believe the five-year-old white boy over the seven or eight year old black boy. I knew that at five. I knew it. And I look back on that. And I wrote about that in one of the essays. And it's truly the most shameful moment of my life.

[25:31] Tonya Pinkins: Barnum. What happened?

[25:34] Richard Hester: He got in trouble.

[25:36] Tonya Pinkins: What did his get in trouble look like?

[25:38] Richard Hester: He he had a he got a whipping from his uh his uncle, who was our gardener. He got whipped.

[25:44] Tonya Pinkins: Didn't he play with you after that?

[25:46] Richard Hester: Yeah. He played with us after that because that was what life in South Africa was. That's what people of color expected of white people. That's that was what it was. And it it took the distance of being here and being away from that before. I mean, I I don't know how long it took me to figure that out. We moved back to New Jersey and we went to like literally the whitest school that there ever possibly could be. We had 1600 kids, and there was one woman of color in the entire school. I I I would love to know what her story was. I don't know how she got through that, but this is fascinating because you're saying at five years old, you knew you had this power, you knew this was your friend, you knew they'd get in trouble, you knew what would happen to them, you knew they'd have to take it, you knew that there was nothing they could do about it, and you knew you'd have no consequences, they would have consequences, they would still have to play with you because they didn't have anything else they'd have to do, and that was normal reality. That is why white privilege is such a disease.

[27:36] Richard Hester: Truly fascinating. That was part one of this fascinating conversation with Master Richard about his life and his book, HOLD PLEASE, Stage Managing a Pandemic. Come back for part two.

[27:56] Tonya Pinkins: How come you don't say no when you mean no? When you mean no. How come you say we will? How come we say it will when you will not?

[28:23] Tonya Pinkins: Thanks for listening to You Can't SAY THAT, the show where you can. I'm Tonya Pinkins, and You Can't SAY THAT is part of the Broadway Podcast Network, produced by Dori Berinstein and Alan Seales, with music by Kat Dail. If you like what you hear, don't forget to subscribe and rate this podcast highly wherever you stream. Follow me on Instagram, Twitter, and Facebook at Tonya Pinkins. And to learn more, visit BPN dot F M forward slash Y C S T. Stay safe. This is Tonya Pinkins.