This transcript was automatically generated and might contain errors.

[0:00] Tonya Pinkins: Welcome back for part two of my conversation with co-founder of the Non-Traditional Casting Project, Harry Newman.

[0:08] Tonya Pinkins: And if you're enjoying what you're listening to, visit me at BPN forward slash you can't say that.

[0:21] Tonya Pinkins: I went to a 50-50 by 2020 event that Jill Soloway sponsored. And she got up and she said, you know, if you call me she, I won't be offended, but if you call me they, I will feel like you saw me. She said, because I feel like our cultural definition of men or he and our cultural definition of her or she is too small for what I am.

[0:48] Tonya Pinkins: Right. And I had this like light bulb go off for me when she said that because I was like, I feel the same way. And so I, you know, I reached out to her and I was like, so, you know, I'm a cis woman. I like to have sexual relations with people who are different, you know, different biologically than me gently genitally. But would it be a misappropriation for me to go around saying they that that's my pronoun? Right. And, you know, she felt that it was not. And she referred me to a website that I can't recall right now for me to learn more about this. But I felt very strongly like, yeah, I'm bigger than what she is defined as in my world, and I'm bigger than what he is defined in my world.

[1:32] Tonya Pinkins: So when we have to do, you know, gender questions at the first day of class at NYU, which I think it's just such a waste of time. It's that Daniel King thing where, you know, people think we try to come up with solutions. Our brain wants to come up with the easy fix, the easy solution. So the solution to gender fluidity is we just ask people what their pronoun is, and then it's solved. And the fact is, when you're that young and you're in college, you don't know what your pronoun is. You're still figuring things out. And there are people who you can look at them and they're using a certain pronoun, but it doesn't define who they are. They're just using words that work in the world that they're in.

[2:10] Tonya Pinkins: So, you know, I just decided my pronoun is D for diva. I would and I would have that's pretty funny. But I would argue let's dispense with pronouns entirely and be that fluid.

[2:21] Harry Newman: I'm with you.

[2:23] Tonya Pinkins: What that would be going back. I mean, like in the Great Iroquois Confederacy, they had like 27 different genders. Right. As a writer, I have trouble with using the pronoun they. I read poetry websites, and the bio would be a very good writer who I don't I can't think of an example, but um the pronoun being used in the bio was they, but they're talking about an individual. And to me as a writer, that's that's a bent I can see the seams of the language being bent in ways that I think as on casually in the street, it's one thing, but in terms of or you know, in a classroom, but as in a writing setting, a writer writing their bio to go with their poems in this journal's website. I start to find that a little bit it just doesn't feel right to me. I'm talking about purely linguistically.

[3:09] Harry Newman: Right, but I think that's because we're old, because I think we're gonna see a whole generation of plays where the they, them, their pronoun is going to be used, and our brains are gonna have to adjust to that.

[3:21] Tonya Pinkins: But that's also just the beginning, though. So in a few more years, everyone will be defining their own language so totally we wouldn't be able to communicate and have plays with each other. Because what why stop at they? It could go on.

[3:32] Harry Newman: I'm just talking again, I agree with you. It could keep going on.

[3:35] Tonya Pinkins: Right. So Diva might be a D, will be a pronoun. I think a lot of people are gonna claim that one. Billy Porter probably will, Jordan, you know, Raw. They'll be claiming the D pronoun.

[3:48] Harry Newman: And it all started here.

[3:51] Tonya Pinkins: Well, I have to say that, you know, one of my pet peeves, oh, I'm doing, I'm gonna say what you can't say, I'm doing it, I'm doing it, I'm doing it, is that I do think that biology matters. And I don't think a trans person, no matter which way they're going, becomes the biological gender that the other thing is. I just don't. And I feel like for me as a woman, because we are so limited in what we get anyway, for another group of people to want to come and claim some of the rights of women, which are so few to begin with, that feels like a transgression for me. Like we don't have that many rights. Now we gotta share them with people who used to be patriarchs. I have a problem with that.

[4:35] Harry Newman: I can't really say well, I mean I have to think more about it, but I mean I hear your problem with it. You're definitely troubled, I can say definitely.

[4:48] Harry Newman: But I mean to me I might speak towards what I was saying a few minutes ago, which is I don't know how to say this exactly, but someone who is there is an immediate I well there seems to be from my, you know, outside the community sense that there's an immediate grabbing for a label as trans woman as opposed to adopting something that can't quite be defined as female or male. And yes. And so that would be interesting to me. And I think socially more challenging than trying to fit that every person who takes that step into the female mold, if you will. Now some people may want that, and that but but it seems like that's the only choice now. Or again, from the outside, I'm not part of that community.

But we all have friends who you know are part of that community, so I have you know but it's I don't know what motivates it has to be that one choice, it seems, but maybe there are people who have made speak and feel and communicate more broadly, but I don't really but that gets us back to this biology thing that you were saying I was limiting my student with.

[5:53] Tonya Pinkins: Yes. It's like he is a man. I will happily allow him to imagine himself to be anything. I don't want him to put a limit on it. But he is a man, and there's some things he knows that I don't know because of his biology. And there's some things I know that he doesn't know because of his biology. And there's some things that trans people know that I don't know because their biology is a whole nother biology too. So I don't want to limit any of it.

[6:24] Harry Newman: Right. I want to have more, more, more, more ways rather than you know, cut the pie.

[6:30] Tonya Pinkins: Well, it's that's sort of what I'm saying. You're getting backing into what I was saying earlier, which was that you're saying he has to he's the I he a boy wouldn't be allowed into that setting of this play. I don't know anything about that's true. But but why? Why why just accept in the terms of this class the playwright wrote it? But in terms of this classroom, because I'm the teacher and I say something.

[6:53] Harry Newman: Well that's something different.

[6:54] Tonya Pinkins: But again you might be hitting against the I'm the teacher and I say something. So that may be hitting against your limitations, is what I was saying earlier. I'm agreeing with you. Right. I might have a limitation. Right. I mean, as I said, if he had just not told me what he couldn't do and said what he could do, I would have been fine. That could be a very good talk at the first day of class beyond the pronouns and say, Don't tell me what you can't do, tell me what you can.

[7:18] Harry Newman: Whatever they tell me they can or can't do, I'm gonna make them do it. Like, you know, I'd make them tell me they're pet peeves, and then I push all of them. Because as actors, that becomes like fodder for like your work.

[7:29] Tonya Pinkins: Right. Yeah, like that's we I say to my students, the more you're suffering, the more the audience is loving it. That's the job description. Like, don't tell me about you don't want to be triggered. That's the job description. People pay to watch us go through things they don't want to go through. It's cathartic for them.

[7:47] Harry Newman: Right. I'm really glad we're talking so much about class, by the way. We didn't have to only talk about class, we could talk about anything I wanted to talk about. And you know, that's I know that you also have this background in the Non-Traditional Casting Society, and that's a big thing for me as well.

[8:03] Tonya Pinkins: Right. So, yeah. Yeah, I'm here to talk about anything.

[8:07] Harry Newman: Good. Uh once I was at an at what do you call it? Um so here's another one of my limitations. You just made me think of one. I went to the this EEOC meeting, and it was plays on Black History Month, and there were no POC people who had submitted plays on Black History Month. And so that in and of itself was like, who's running this committee that you don't even know any POC people to get a play from them? Because I could like pick up my phone and call a bunch of POC people and they got plays. So that was my first annoyance. But then my next annoyance was that like one non POC person had written two plays, and one was called Mary Todd Lincoln and her dressmaker. I thought my head was gonna explode.

I really I was like, if they produce that play, I'm gonna pick it. Because I was like, you know, first of all, Mary Todd Lincoln's dressmaker had a name, and it was Elizabeth Keckley, and everything you know about Mary Todd Lincoln, you know because Elizabeth Keckley wrote a biography. So, like for me, that's a misappropriation.

[9:17] Tonya Pinkins: Right. I don't fault her for having writing a play that was probably a great role that she wrote for herself to play. But when she's gonna erase from the narrative the person who made the narrative even possible.

[9:29] Harry Newman: But did you read the play or you're just responding to the title?

[9:31] Tonya Pinkins: Oh, I was just responding to a non-POC work person writing a play called Mary Todd Lincoln and her dressmaker, where every bit of data that had to come from it had to come from the dressmaker who doesn't have a name.

[9:42] Harry Newman: Yep.

[9:43] Tonya Pinkins: Well, but you knew that in the play it it that she didn't have a name. I mean, because I'm not sure.

[9:49] Harry Newman: That was enough for me.

[9:51] Tonya Pinkins: But we don't know in the play.

[9:53] Harry Newman: No, and I didn't want to know. I was being asked to give money to it. That was not going to get any money from me. But if the play had been called you know my appomatics, it you wouldn't have had that response.

[10:04] Tonya Pinkins: Exactly. Because that would have meant she had taken some thought, but that she had actually had to think of a title, and that somehow in her thinking of the title, she didn't think the dressmaker's name mattered. For me, that is an is not seeing me as a brown person.

[10:21] Harry Newman: Yeah, I can say that might not have been her intention at all.

[10:24] Tonya Pinkins: Clearly, she wasn't thinking about brown people at all when she came up with that title. Dispaired impact, like I was saying earlier, it wasn't necessarily the intent to it might not have been the intent. Right, but I received it as you erased my people from the narrative.

[10:37] Harry Newman: Right. What other what other annoyances can you uh

[10:39] Tonya Pinkins: Oh, no, we don't have time for the podcast. I could be your next podcast. My first annoyance.

[10:46] Harry Newman: No, no, no, no. But that's in this, you know, non-traditional, inclusive. Like, I don't want to stop her from writing the play. Right. But I think someone has to tell her that's not okay. I was the person to do it. And she was like immediately, I'm happy to add that name to the thing. And I'm like, I'm not trying to control your creativity. Right. Okay. But I do want to call you on the fact that as a person of color, I clocked the fact that you didn't include the name of a very historically significant person in my culture.

[11:17] Harry Newman: Right.

[11:18] Tonya Pinkins: So what happened? Did you not produce the whole evening? Because it was all non-POC writers.

[11:23] Harry Newman: A very strange thing happened. There was a tie. All of the white people voted for it to be put published. All of the black people voted for it not to be funded. All of the Asian people decided not to vote at all. They abstained. Which theoretically should have allowed it to go forward. But I think that the head of that committee knew that it wasn't worth going locking horns with me about it. So they opened it up and a month more for more people to for people to actually find some people of color to to make plays in Black History Month. And they did find some. And I actually brought in someone who was a non POC person who wrote a play about oh my God, why has her name just fell out of my head? She was this beautiful blonde haired, blue eyed, one of the first big band leaders. Name's not going to come to me, but she was passing.

[12:19] Tonya Pinkins: Oh, that's interesting.

[12:21] Harry Newman: And I brought her in because this woman looked like a, you know, she was blonde haired and blue-eyed. So it made perfect sense to me that this woman would be telling this story because she looked like the woman whose life it was.

[12:35] Tonya Pinkins: Yeah. So it wasn't that I you know had a problem with a non-POC person telling the story or writing it.

[12:42] Harry Newman: Yeah.

[12:43] Tonya Pinkins: So there was a happy ending.

[12:45] Harry Newman: There was a happy ending. Some POC people got their plays produced during Black History Month.

[12:51] Tonya Pinkins: That's making me tear up.

[12:53] Harry Newman: You're you're smirking though.

[12:55] Tonya Pinkins: No, I'm not.

[12:55] Harry Newman: You're sniping at me.

[12:56] Tonya Pinkins: No, no, no.

[12:57] Harry Newman: I'm glad it had a happy ending.

[12:59] Tonya Pinkins: I don't know if it was a happy ending. It's just those are the kind of things that make my blood boil. Because I do think it is a people not like you know, it's like when people say, I don't see color. Well then you don't see me because you know what? I got a lot of melanin. So it isn't uh it's that performance of tolerance as opposed to I don't know, uh being for me. I appreciate when people are willing to put their foot in their mouth with me. Right, you know?

[13:26] Harry Newman: Well, I think what we're what we were talking about, if you kind of summarize some of the things we've started talking about back from your student onward, is that everything so much as this is sort of uh carried by language, so it was the pronoun that was the sticking point for this person, so to speak. Uh the title was a sticking point for you. Um the um I don't see color, this idea which is a linguistic idea ultimately, of course they see it. They're unwilling, they don't want to venture into not or look, they don't want to look beyond it or look with it towards something else. Uh so these are all show, you know, again, you know, thorny issues of language that we get stuck on. Uh sometimes they have deep meanings attached to it.

Because I love language, it's an issue of not wanting to risk being wrong, not wanting to risk looking stupid, not wanting to risk offending someone. And ultimately, if you are interested in having a real relationship with someone, those are risks you have to take. So for me, when you don't want to risk that with me, then I'm actually not important to you. And I often say, you know, yeah, when I care about somebody, I risk being radically honest with them because that's the kind of relationship I want to build with them.

[14:45] Tonya Pinkins: You can't do that with everyone, though. I mean, there are too many people that you can try. Takes a lot of work though, I think.

[14:58] Harry Newman: What else is there to be alive for?

[14:59] Tonya Pinkins: Oh, yeah, I understand. I mean, they asked me to do a play. Here I go, saying something I can't say. I was asked to do a Todd Salon's play at The Flea. They brought me, they went, I wasn't asked to do the play, I was asked to do a reading of it. A play of his, not a film. A play. Interesting. A play. And I was told, oh my god, this is the role. You've been waiting for a role. This is it, this is it. Come in, let's do this thing. So we read this play, wonderful actors, and all of the other characters had monologues. They were arias. I mean, arias of neuroses. I mean, they were fabulous arias of neuroscience. He's a wonderful, wonderfully talented writer. And my character spoke monosyllabically.

Yes. No. More cash. And it was a story based on uh this Latino woman who murdered her two charges. And he had decided to make it a black woman. So yes, that pushed my button that you're gonna take something that isn't in my culture, put it in my culture, and then you're gonna take my voice away in the play. And then at the end of the play, after she's murdered these children and she's in jail, she has a monologue about all the terrible things that happened to her. And I was like, that's not okay, because there's just I said, you know, I can play, I can play a child murderer, I could play Medea, I could do that. But in this play, I don't know why she murdered these children. And so her monologue after she's murdered these children is meaningless to me, because I hate her.

I hate her, I'm not gonna care about her. And I said, first of all, as a black person, I recognize that every time I get on the stage, people are projecting that I'm going to be the bad guy. So when I walk on the stage, that is what I carry. I'm the bad guy. So you delivered on what the expectation was. You didn't surprise me, you didn't reveal anything new to me, and therefore I I'm I'm not the actress.

[17:06] Harry Newman: Well, he was probably writing that character as an idea of a character as opposed to a character as opposed to a person. It was sort of an idea that he had, uh, a generalized sense of this person who did this without really doing the work.

[17:19] Tonya Pinkins: I I don't want to criticize Todd Salon's play, why not? Um doing the work to actually make it real, what you're saying. I again, not having been part of that experience, but what would you describe? It sounds like someone who he may not know why she killed those children either, except for the historical fact that he was basing it on that a woman in a similar situation uh kills her two kids from under her care. Uh but he, you know, it seems like he just stopped there from your description of it. And that character, because every other character was fantastic. They were fantastic. So it wasn't that he wasn't capable of writing great things, but it's like why when you got to the black woman, she is just like she was a cipher, uh she was an idea of a character as opposed to a person.

[18:07] Harry Newman: You know, when I've written my plays, I don't see them as characters, I see them as people, the characters in my play. I relate to them as people. Uh I mean I sometimes use the language of when I call them, I call them a character. Uh but in the actual writing, when I'm writing it, I I I relate to them as people more. And you know, maybe I can't distinguish between fiction and reality very well, but but it's helpful for me because it makes it more of a something a reality that I have to live with in and invest in a certain way. And I guess for me it's it's I'm gonna tell another story about me.

[18:44] Tonya Pinkins: Another about you, another about me. Here's the story. I wrote a play, Red Pill, my movie that I'm making, and I love horror. So it's a horror film. And this is relating to the Salon's play. And one of my oldest friends, I've known over 30 years, read I asked her to look at it because she's a great design sense, and I asked if she would look at it and give me some design ideas. And so she read it and she's read other plays of mine. We've acted together, I've directed her, and she calls me up and she begins to tell me, you know, how talented, how wonderful I am, how much she loves me, how much blah blah blah blah blah, and how you know people in plays need to have love and compassion, and they need to be good people, and when you write something, it's a reflection of you and your ideas, and this doesn't reflect really well on you.

And I was like, but it's exactly what I want to say, and I really like it. And I however it reflects, I've said what I meant to say. And it kept frustrating her. And she kept saying, Well, I'm only telling you this because I love you. And I was like, Well, actually, you haven't told me anything. Why don't you tell me what you hated? What offended you?

[19:48] Harry Newman: Something made her uncomfortable.

[19:51] Tonya Pinkins: Correct. So she got quiet and she said, It made me feel like you don't like white people, and I might not be safe with you. Wow. And I was like, Thank you. And for me, that was like the message I needed from the universe that I had actually made something that was making people uncomfortable. But beyond that, there was the question of, I said to her, so when you see these movies or plays where white men rape women and kill them and slice them up, do you not feel safe with them? Because you actually aren't safe with them, but you do you not feel safe with them? Do you know the idea that she could throw away a 30-year relationship because of one story that I wrote? And then to carry that beyond, it's like my whole career is having to separate people from the horrible depictions of my race and my culture that they make.

[20:45] Harry Newman: Well, it was a new experience for her, probably. The idea that you might the discomfort of not being liked was probably a new experience for her. She'd never sort of imagined seeing it like that. Whereas you mentioned earlier, and you know, it's the live reality that you uh draw from, and that you that you it's part of your daily experience. And so, because that's new, I mean, this does not uh this is not dis uh disconnected from the class issues, really, because that often is what happens in the privileged group whatever it is uh they see themselves as the baseline they see themselves as the the measure of goodness if you will and it's hard to it it can become very personal uh if someone suddenly says well yeah but you're not the measure of goodness uh or or your your a measure but not the only measure and suddenly their whole basis of definition for not just themselves but maybe kind of a society that they saw in a certain way but this seems like a very personal response so it probably may be just individual it it shifts and they're not used to that you're not used to being anything but having your if you're part of the elite of what however defined economically or you know socially and certainly you're not you're the one setting the rules you're not and living within the rules that your people your group set so you're not used to having those challenged in a way or uh being held account for them.

[22:09] Tonya Pinkins: And so maybe that's what drove some of that personal experience and response. But it is curious.

[22:15] Harry Newman: It's curious but then it becomes do those plays by other non by those POC writers is that happening where stories like that that are making people uncomfortable aren't getting to the theater. Because they're rubbing people the wrong way.

[22:30] Tonya Pinkins: Possibly yeah yeah I I think that's true of a lot of political writing really political writing that doesn't uh uh that challenges certain fundamental things about militarism or about you know in the society I've had that experience with my uh with poetry or even some of my plays that are very political uh that I think that they don't they they can only be apprehended by decision makers in the abstract they they can't penetrate into the reality of the play because oh that's about this or you know whatever the topic may be and it it shuts them down you know there are gatekeepers and they come from a certain it's it's become a less restrictive uh in the last you know decades maybe but at one time it was very limited to a very specific number of people and it's very hard to get through them if they all are from a certain class or a certain disposition or a certain you know whatever.

[23:22] Harry Newman: Yeah so what do we do about that of course people go to the same schools and they know each other and people want to work with their friends and you know so then you you get into a a school or something and you look around and everybody looks like they came from the same community.

[23:38] Tonya Pinkins: Right.

[23:38] Harry Newman: Like so then that's what the theater is that they make. Or even if they bring a POC person in, they bring a POC person in who has decided to adopt all of the same trappings of their class and their school and their culture and so you just get the most the POC person who is actually exactly the same. They just are the different skin color.

[24:00] Tonya Pinkins: I understand right and I mean yeah I doesn't that speak to what the purpose of theater is ultimately if you see the if you yearn for a kind of theater of reassurance then of course you're going to stay within that but if theater for you is meant to be taking you beyond your circumstances uh then you wouldn't be that what Clifford O'Detz was doing.

[24:21] Harry Newman: I don't know.

[24:22] Tonya Pinkins: Well I haven't heard from him in so long.

[24:24] Harry Newman: Yeah but I mean there used to be a time when theater was showing us things that people we didn't talk about.

[24:30] Tonya Pinkins: Right.

[24:30] Harry Newman: You know, theater shook us up uh angels in America, you know, it shook us up. I'm trying to think of something that shook us up.

[24:30] Tonya Pinkins: Shook us up.

[24:41] Harry Newman: The last thing that shook us up.

[24:44] Tonya Pinkins: Well, I think Fairview had that impact for some people. I know that I heard from people telling me that it was true.

[24:50] Harry Newman: Okay.

[24:52] Tonya Pinkins: Yes, tell me, what did it impact? Did it have?

[24:55] Harry Newman: Well, on the people that talked to me, uh, they thought that they similar to what we're saying. That last moment of the play, when you go on stage, they were suddenly, they felt they were suddenly uh made aware of that be you know, that shift that we were just talking about earlier.

[25:09] Tonya Pinkins: And these were white people.

[25:10] Harry Newman: Well, that's how the play unfolds, right?

[25:13] Tonya Pinkins: Right.

[25:13] Harry Newman: But once again, white people were centered in a play by a black person that was supposedly about black people.

[25:17] Tonya Pinkins: Right.

[25:17] Harry Newman: So she wrote a play for them because that was what they were gonna pay to go see.

[25:20] Tonya Pinkins: Right.

[25:20] Harry Newman: Right. I went to that play, I figured it out in the first before the play started, and I was like, oh, this play is not even for me.

[25:26] Tonya Pinkins: Did you see it at uh Soho Rep, or did you see it?

[25:28] Harry Newman: I saw it at Brooklyn Tefana.

[25:30] Tonya Pinkins: Yeah, I saw it there too. And I was like, wow.

[25:33] Harry Newman: It's very it once you start. I mean, it's a play all about the ending, essentially. And once you start pulling back, it becomes extremely complicated when asking some of the questions you ask, it becomes very complicated. And not it's slippery, you know what I'm saying?

[25:46] Tonya Pinkins: Well, how slippery? Come on, let's talk about it. We have something now we share, a play in common. This has got diversity, it's got a lot of people.

[25:50] Harry Newman: Well, I think exactly what you're saying. Yeah, I think I think it's part of what you're saying. That uh what I think you just said was that the writer was writing for a very specific audience. And so part of the complaint is I can't reach my people in the last monologue, which is beautifully written. She was talking about I want to be with my people telling stories, right? My own stories. The daughter character stepping off the stage and having all the people who define as white. For me, it was just like some wine, and it was like back for me, which is the same quote I use all the time, James Baldwin. Like, if I was complaining about how the white man was oppressing me, he would know he was doing his job. I'm like, like, let's like stop blind. Like we can't keep asking the fox to stop eating the chickens. Let's like you know.

[26:39] Harry Newman: But to get back to, but so that that's a little bit slippery in the sense that she knows where the play was being produced. And so she's saying, which is not a black centered theater. So it's a meta, it's meta. Not necessarily. I don't know how you're using that word. But what I'm saying is there are many black centered theaters that could have done that play, and she chose to go to this other. Well, I want to actually see it in DC. Someone's doing it that's a POC person.

[27:01] Tonya Pinkins: What do you mean a POC person?

[27:05] Harry Newman: A POC person is directing it, so I think that whatever their lens on it might speak to me. Maybe maybe the same play though. Who knows? I'm curious enough. I wasn't, you know, so taken out by it that I was like, I don't want to see what else could be done with it. But I think that the lens that was on it was so much a white lens that whatever she was trying to say as a black artist was lost on me.

[27:39] Tonya Pinkins: Right. You know, it's like you're a black artist, you're talking about the fact that you can't speak to your people because you have to get a white theater to produce you and you have to have white directors and all of that. Like I don't know. I mean, I understand that that's the situation that the artists are in, but if everybody just keeps going, yeah, that's the way it is, so I'm gonna just go along with it, I don't see that as making it move or change.

[28:09] Harry Newman: I don't disagree in a certain way. I mean, I mean it's I think it's a play that if you spend too much time thinking about it intellectually, it starts to unravel its impact, is sort of what I'm saying. Both in terms of um you know what you're just saying, that she could have had that play. There are black-centered theaters. There are fewer of them than there were a couple of decades ago, but they still are. Um so to say that there's no place for my stories to be told as my stories, that's not entirely true. Um but uh and similarly, what is that story that's being told? All those characters are ciphers, all those characters were representations, right? Exaggerated representations. So that's really what it wasn't as if it were a moving black story, right?

It was never set up to be. Right. That so that's also another complication. Uh uh, maybe it added up well in a certain way, but I as I said the play is all about that ending. The ending, I might my person I went with was a person of color. She was very moved by being in the audience.

[29:10] Tonya Pinkins: Was she young?

[29:11] Harry Newman: No.

[29:12] Tonya Pinkins: Okay.

[29:12] Harry Newman: A little younger than we are. But not but not young. I know, because I'm like an old New York theater audience critic. Like I'm like, ah, it wasn't as good as the first time they did it.

[29:22] Tonya Pinkins: Right, right. No, that's true. I mean, there are these cycles that we see the same thing being done. Yeah, either the same play or the same kind of thing. That's the new latest new thing. But no, she wasn't. Uh, but uh I uh a white older producer that I know said it was the most uh moving um, I can't remember the exact quote, but the most moving rendering of race, play about race in America in the last 30 years, which convinced me to go see it.

[29:49] Harry Newman: Wow. And did you feel that way too?

[29:52] Tonya Pinkins: No, but I I it had more value to me than than it did to uh uh you, but in part because of the person I was with and it was so moved yeah we'll still move and then it also opened up a kind of discussion for this feeling I like I feel like if it moved you then you know it's clearly worthy of all the acclaim and the praise that it got because it's transforming people.

[30:13] Harry Newman: Right. I it just you know maybe I'm just at a different level in my life where that's not the thing I need to transform me.

[30:20] Tonya Pinkins: Right. Yeah I'm glad we talked about that. I've not talked about it with anyone really actually didn't tell us anything about what you thought about it. You kind of equivocated and talked about what somebody else felt about it and you didn't tell me what you really thought about it. Did you like it?

[30:37] Harry Newman: As I said my my view was sort of in the middle. But I I appreciated it but I but I had those so issues that once you start peeling it away from the emotional impact of the ending that last moment it starts to not hold up intellectually I was just annoyed because I figured out from the very beginning because you know I go into the theater and I'm I'm like I like to solve puzzles. So I go in and go okay what's the scenic design telling me what's the distinct and that's you could see you can see the border of a television. Okay this is a sitcom. Okay I don't like sitcoms. I would never watch a sitcom okay but why are they showing me a sitcom? Oh there's gonna be surveillance because the name is fair view. Okay so I'm trying to get the puzzle and then I'm like I'm in a theater and listening to a voiceover watching black people mime. Right. This is meta this is over my head I just want to feel something. I want to care.

[31:31] Tonya Pinkins: Right. And I don't. Right. But it's ultimately that was all a setup for that last moment. And I as you say, it depends on how that moment worked for you. If it worked for you, it's that's a long setup.

[31:43] Harry Newman: Yeah. I'm like one of those people. You better show me in like the first act, because I'm not coming to act two.

[31:54] Tonya Pinkins: But there was no act break, right?

[31:55] Harry Newman: No, there was no act break. Harry, is there anything else that I didn't ask you that you wanted to talk about before we say bonsoir?

[32:03] Harry Newman: Well, not knowing what we were supposed to talk about. Well, there is nothing we're supposed to talk about. Is there anything you want to say? I didn't even know the title of the podcast.

[32:11] Tonya Pinkins: Well, you should have looked it up online, Harry. I'm your friend. You don't even look up and find out what I do.

[32:16] Harry Newman: I don't do podcasts. This is the first one I've ever done and listened to. In fact, you wrote a bio, but you didn't look up my podcast.

[32:23] Tonya Pinkins: There was a Google alert about it last week.

[32:25] Harry Newman: Uh what is a Google alert?

[32:26] Tonya Pinkins: Oh my God. Oh my. Are you joking?

[32:29] Harry Newman: Well, I know what they are in the abstract, but I don't I don't part I don't partake in Google Alerts.

[32:34] Tonya Pinkins: Oh well, I have myself on a Google alert.

[32:36] Harry Newman: You are. It yes, tell me what I'm doing, because that's the only way I would know.

[32:40] Tonya Pinkins: Well, as I said, I mostly sit in my room.

[32:43] Harry Newman: So I mostly sit in my room too. Anything that I didn't ask you that you thought I was gonna do. And and is there anything that you had in your notes that I've done?

[32:53] Harry Newman: That's my shopping list, actually.

[32:54] Tonya Pinkins: Okay. Is there anything?

[32:56] Harry Newman: No, not at the moment, but I'd love to come back and talk more.

[32:58] Tonya Pinkins: About what?

[32:59] Harry Newman: About whatever.

[33:00] Tonya Pinkins: Like what?

[33:01] Harry Newman: I don't know. Talk about class, talk about art, theater.

[33:06] Tonya Pinkins: Okay. Your film, my writing.

[33:08] Harry Newman: This is a theater podcast. I don't think I get to talk about my film, though Dory said she might make an exception. Let me talk about the red pill. If you go in the weekly world news, you can find out about the red pill creature.

[33:20] Tonya Pinkins: You've read about it, right?

[33:21] Harry Newman: Yes, you sent me the link.

[33:23] Tonya Pinkins: And you have a new play?

[33:24] Harry Newman: Not the not. I have a play that was just presented, yes, the Dry Time.

[33:28] Tonya Pinkins: Okay, Dry Time, which was fantastic.

[33:30] Harry Newman: Thank you. Really wonderful play. Why don't you tell us what it was about?

[33:33] Tonya Pinkins: Are we continuing on?

[33:34] Harry Newman: This is part of Yeah, we wait until I say goodbye.

[33:37] Tonya Pinkins: Well, I'm ready, I'm waiting for this all to be edited out.

[33:42] Harry Newman: It'll just be a monologue.

[33:44] Tonya Pinkins: It could be. Well, why I stumbled when you said a new play, why I I kind of hesitated to say is because this is a play that I wrote in the early 90s, which was essentially the first global warming related play, Dry Time. And it was presented for the first time after about 27 years in this rather very well done stage reading, directed by Lisa and Day Evans and with a beautiful cast of about 13 people. And it uh unlike a lot of plays that relate to climate change and all that's going on now, this one doesn't try to make a case for the science, which I had been reading at MIT from the mid-80s onward. It just sort of accepts that as a given and looks at the social implications of it, sort of each each scene of the play or two, as you know.

Yes, I see. I was there. Um are two scenes that overlap. Follow it that take place more or less at the and um they overlap and they constantly unfold together on the stage, although they involve different groups of people in nearby each other in the same period of time more or less. And ultimately those two groups sort of the division between those groups get breached and they end up meeting essentially. And one group is more or less refugees, climate of refugees, you could call them. I didn't think of that at the time I was writing. Right. I mean, for having been written 20 years ago, we are living that play already. I mean, that's it's sad that that play is come to pass. What did they say? We're at 1.1 and we're definitely going to get to two and maybe four by the end of this.

[35:20] Harry Newman: Yeah, well, depends on how you define it, whether it's actually whether you measure the heat increase over land or over water. Over land, we're well above 1.5 already increase. If we take the total global temperature increase, including over the surface of the water, is lower because water retains heat longer water, meaning the ocean, not you know, right. The the big water, as you'd say. But they get to to curse, because you asked me to curse at the beginning of the, I think you said before, when we were having the very brief rehearsal, but which about half of which was six hours of rehearsal, but it was really done according to equity standards. Uh so half of that about an hour were breaks, of course, and then the half of that was staging, because we actually wanted to Lee wanted to capture the uh the suggestion of the overlapping scenes, but only with music stands and that we had available to us.

Uh but shortly after we began the rehearsals, I talked very briefly because there was a limit on time about the origin of the play. Uh about halfway through one of the actors said to me, he was playing the lead role, he was playing the the writer in it, said, You wrote this 20 something years ago. I said, Yes. And he said, What are you, fucking Nostradamus? Which is really humorous to me. But um, you know, it's only because things have become so horrible that the play is still has relevance. It would be much nicer, much better to have written a play that's totally disconnected from reality.

[36:42] Tonya Pinkins: Right. And and if we get to class, once again, we might say that this play might not get produced in a commercial theater because it's too much about a reality that we're spending our time pretending isn't a reality.

[36:53] Harry Newman: Well, there's also class issues embedded in the in the play very strongly. Very much about who gets to have water and who doesn't get to have water in the water. Who gets to have a party and who gets to sort of watch it from a swimming pool and swim in water where other people can't even drink water. Right. Which we're not, you know, Detroit sold all its water rights. Or Michigan sold its water rights to Nestle. Yeah. People don't have clean water, but they could sell their water rights to Nestle. For very little, I'm sure.

[37:21] Tonya Pinkins: Very little money. Well, I'm so happy that I got to have this conversation.

[37:24] Harry Newman: Yeah, this is great.

[37:25] Tonya Pinkins: It could be 10 years before we talk about it.

[37:26] Harry Newman: Yeah, let's meet in ten years and do this again.

[37:27] Tonya Pinkins: Let's let's meet in ten years and do it again.

[37:30] Harry Newman: Harry Newman.

[37:31] Tonya Pinkins: Tiny. Thank you. I always think of your email Newman off. And you are on the Broadway Podcast Network with Tonya Pinkins, You Can't SAY THAT, The Show Where You Can.

[37:47] Tonya Pinkins: Thanks for listening to You Can't SAY THAT, The Show Where You Can. I'm Tonya Pinkins. This is part of the Broadway Podcast Network, produced by Dori Berinstein and Alan Seales. Edited by Derek Gunther. Music by Anthony Norman. Available wherever you get your podcast. And visit me on Twitter and Facebook and Instagram. And let me know what you'd like to hear me talk about. For more information, visit BPN.fm forward slash YCST.