Breaking the Fourth Wall with Isaac Butler

Isaac Butler is an author, critic, theater director, and professor known for his books The Method: How The Twentieth Century Learned to Act and The World Only Spins Forward: The Ascent of Angels in America, co-written with Dan Kois. Butler’s writing has appeared in numerous publications such as New York magazine, The Guardian, the Los Angeles Review of Books, and Slate magazine. For Slate, he also created and hosted the podcast “Lend Me Your Ears”, about Shakespeare and politics, and currently co-hosts “Working”, a podcast about the creative process. Butler’s work as a theater director has been seen on stages throughout the United States and he is the co-creator of “Real Enemies”, which was named one of the best live events of 2015 by the New York Times. Butler currently teaches Theater History and Performance at NYU Tisch.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:02):
This is Alec Baldwin and you're listening to Here's the
Thing from iHeart Radio. My guest today is an author, critic,
and theater director. His most recent book, The Method, How
the Twentieth Century Learned to Act, has been named one
of the best books of twenty twenty two by The

(00:22):
New Yorker, Time Magazine, the San Francisco Chronicle, and Vanity Fair.
Isaac Butler has studied acting since childhood, performing in Washington,
d C's theater scene. He is now an adjunct instructor
of Theater History and Performance at NYU Tish. Butler is
also the author of the World Only Spins Forward, The

(00:46):
Ascent of Angels in America. His writing on theater and
film has appeared in numerous publications such as New York Magazine,
The Guardian, Slate, and The Los Angeles Review of Books.
I was curious to know Butler's opinion of the three
great actors he mentions in his book, Lee Strasburg, Sandy Meisner,

(01:07):
Stella Adler, and how he came to write The Method.

Speaker 2 (01:12):
What I wanted to do with the book was, since
I had never met Lee or Stella or Sandy or
any of those people. They were all, you know, dead
before I went to college, was to really try to
take as seriously as possible the opinions of those who
knew them right, because I wasn't there. And much as
like when you're an actor trying to create a role,
you know, you want to understand that role as deeply

(01:33):
as possible, even if you don't agree with one hundred
percent of that character psychology or the choices they make
in a play. I think most characters who are interesting
are ones who we wouldn't necessarily make all the same
choices they do, because plot comes from.

Speaker 1 (01:45):
When you're playing. You got to give it everything you have,
exactly right.

Speaker 2 (01:48):
And so I wound up having, you know, very complicated
and mostly positive feelings about all of them, Do you
know what I mean? I mean Lee, who I didn't know,
but by all reports was an incredibly difficult person to
get along with, way did not ever say hello or goodbye,
did not make a lot of eye contact, yelled at
people when he very at the drop of a hat, unnecessary,

(02:09):
very imperious, Yeah, very imperious. And you know, at the
same time, so many actors would say, even people who
hated him personally, he changed my life and maybe the
actor I am today, and so you have to respect
both of those things. It is certainly not the case
that Lee's method is good for every actor. And I

(02:30):
think the big problem that Lee and to some extent
Stella and some of the other people ran into is
getting a little high on their own supply about that
that there was one true way to get to the truth.
There's all sorts of different ways to get to the truth.
And Lee would give lip service to that. Sometimes he'd
be like, you know, Laurence Olivier gets to the truth
by finding the right shirt or whatever. He didn't really
accept that if his students did it, you know. And

(02:53):
so I think that what actually is most important is
that the student find the right teacher for them. And
what's been interesting since the death of that generation, or
actually started when late in life, how many people would
take classes from both Stella and Sandy or you know,
would go to see Lee and then go to udhah
Hagen or whatever and try to kind of get the

(03:13):
things they were missing from each and create their own
way of doing it. Because ultimately, after years and years
and years in a career, you found your own technique.
It might be based on their technique. But there's stuff
that's useful to you, there's stuff that isn't, and you
find your own way.

Speaker 1 (03:27):
I think for me, Strasburg was somebody who the number
one thing, which they made the number one thing, and
maybe they didn't emphasize it enough, maybe not enough of
them completely grasp the necessity of relaxation. Right. You got
to turn off all the pipes and vowels of your day.
You got to go to work, you can't talk to people,
you can't be on the phone with your girlfriend breaking

(03:48):
up with her. You got to cut all that off
and just be here now and sit in a chair.
And if you want to read a book, don't go
to your trailer. Go to your trailer when the scene
is over and it's a break. But we're during the
shots of that scene said on the set, stay connected
to this, all these things of connection, relaxation, concentration, and
then you have a shot at the other things happening.
You have no shot if the other things don't happen.

Speaker 2 (04:09):
Yeah, I mean, Stanislavsky was very serious about relaxation, you know,
and Strasburg is adapting a lot of those ways that
Stanislavsky developed. You know, he started doing yoga. He was
very interested in breathing exercises, a lot of stuff that
we associate today with like mindfulness. You know, Stanislavsky was
doing to try to figure out how to totally relax
as an actor, because he was totally all about that

(04:32):
that it was only once you were relaxed that you
could actually do the work, because otherwise it's all getting
contained in your body and it's not going anywhere.

Speaker 1 (04:40):
You know, when you talk about a method acting performance,
you're talking about Brando obviously, and Clift and I studied
with Mirror Rostova, Oh amazing Cliff's teacher. You know, she
was in her nineties. She taught in the living room
of a friend's apartment and she would teacheck and she
changed my life because she talked to me about how
actors very often are playing the scene at the expense
of the the act right listening, oh Jack Lemon thing

(05:02):
where you have to be really really be very acute
and you're listening and responding and so forth. And she
really changed my life because I was doing a soap opera,
and soap opera acting is defined by an actor walking
and going. You know, you're not going to take over
those shares of Paul my industry's day. Let me tell
you that right now, right, and the next time, the
next scene, it's like, I love you, Mary, goddamn it,
I love you. You know, they play the same cadence

(05:24):
and the same emotional register, regardless of the same right.
Was she a yeller to Mirah?

Speaker 2 (05:30):
That's interesting because a lot of the Russians, I mean,
where Strasburg and Stella yelled a lot too, right, And
where they got it from was was this student of
Stanislavsky's name Maria Ospinskaya of course, who's also very famous
you know film actor.

Speaker 1 (05:42):
Later, Yeah, the Wolf y. You know, I just showed
my kid The Wolf, Mam.

Speaker 2 (05:46):
We're doing the Universal Horror and I was like, oh
my god, it's Maria Osbanskaya. And then, you know, my
kid looked at me and was like, who's that? Why
do you care? And I had to explained she was
Moscow Art Theater, Moscow Art Theater, yeah, and then the
first studio, and then you know, she was when the
Moscow Art Theater came to the United States in the twenties,
there was a group of them who had to stay behind.
They were fired from the company and exiled from the

(06:08):
Soviet or from Russia, you know, because the political wins
were changing, and she was one of them. And she
and another exile, this guy Richard Boloslavsky, who for any
actors who are listening, as the guy who wrote acting
the first six Lessons, the very first book in English
about Stanislavski technique, Love It. And he also directed Ospinskaya
later in a movie. But Richard Boloslavsky and Mario Ospinskaya

(06:29):
were the two fundamental teachers at the school. The American
Laboratory Theater where was that it had a number of
different locations. It moved all around because it was here
in New York, and it was this model that's actually
sort of the conservatory model now, but not exactly where.
You know, you studied very hard for like two years,
and then you joined the best of them joined the
rep company that was associated with the school, and so

(06:52):
they were sort of running all of those those different things.
And you know, Harold Klerman studied there, Lee Strasburg studied there.
Stella Adler's studied there. You know, a lot of the
key twentieth century theater makers study there. Ospinskaya was a
notorious dragon in scene study class. She among other things,
she was an alcoholic, and so she would have a

(07:13):
bottle of what she claimed was cough medicine. It was
jin and she would drink medicine. Yeah, but she would
drink you know, table switch to be like, oh my
cough is worse I need And then eventually she subbed
it out with a pitcher of water that was actually
gin and would just you know, like a little vermouth
with my yes exactly. And so I mean she would
just devastatingly destroy people if she thought they were being lazy.

(07:36):
I think, like any art, and acting is of course
an art as well as a craft at a job
and all sorts of other things. There's a kind of
osmosis of the world around you that you engage in.
You know, like when I am writing a book, there's
often like three albums of music I listened to while
writing it, and even if they're.

Speaker 1 (07:51):
Not, can you share what they are? You've rather not.

Speaker 2 (07:53):
A lot of the method was written to this piece
of music called Canto Ostinado, which is a piece of
mut music that it's a little difficult to explain. It's
sort of a minimalist piece of music. It's about forty
five minutes long, and there's a particular version on Spotify
that's all Cello's doing it, And so there was that.

Speaker 1 (08:10):
I listen to that a lot.

Speaker 2 (08:10):
I have a playlist whenever I'm on deadline, I have
a playlist of the most kind of loud, percussive guitar
solo heavy songs by the Bandiola Tango or my favorite band,
And so I listen to that and just words come.

Speaker 1 (08:24):
Flying out, I thought you'd say, and not that I'm
predating Adagio for streets right right, right right.

Speaker 2 (08:31):
And then there's a jazz composer who I've worked with
a couple of times named Darcy James Argue, who's a
very close friend whose work I love, and so I
usually have one of his albums.

Speaker 1 (08:37):
This is the stuff that carries you over the threshold.

Speaker 2 (08:40):
And part of it is just I've written to this
stuff so much. There's like a sense memory almost, you know,
like now it's time to write.

Speaker 1 (08:47):
You know.

Speaker 2 (08:47):
It's like it just does something to my subconscious and
then away we go. But you know, if I was
writing something sad, I might listen to sad.

Speaker 1 (08:55):
You know.

Speaker 2 (08:55):
I've definitely had those like, oh, this scene has this
certain emotional feeling. I'm going to listen to music that
has that emotional feeling.

Speaker 1 (09:01):
Not words. Can never have words if you're writing for
me anyway. Yeah, for me in acting, I played the
audio clips only of movies that make me sad. Oh really,
so there's a scene that breaks my heart, I'll play
that scene in my ear. I knew.

Speaker 2 (09:13):
I interviewed one actor who told me to prep for
a scene he would watch because it had a similar emotionality,
totally different scene. He wasn't trying to copy what DeNiro did,
but it was just this that that feeling of total devastation,
the scene where DeNiro's punching the wall of the jail
cells and raging bull and he would just watch that.

Speaker 1 (09:29):
And I've not a vast but a limited library of
those scenes that I watched a trigger with certain emotion
in me. Yeah, that's like if you say, you know
the de Niro thing, it's like Brando, you know, we
see don't leave him lying here. I'm gonna take it
out on this skulls. Yeah, when they don't leave me
here like this CD when he finds Steiger's body who
betrayed him, right, But I mean that makes me cry

(09:49):
even out his brother betrayed him, but he's still it's
his brother, you know what I mean? He plays that
like he just an inescapable thing.

Speaker 2 (09:55):
You know what line? And I'm not an actor anymore.
But the line that always, like, when I just even
think about it, I start to get worked up is
when Hamlet says I loved Ophelia forty thousand brothers. That
line about like forty thousand brothers cannot, with all their
love makeup my son or something like that. And there's
just something so first of all, it's a shitty thing
to say to a guy whose sister has just died,
but it's also so emotionally overpowering that if I think

(10:18):
about it long enough, it'll trigger something.

Speaker 1 (10:19):
Same the littlest things. Yeah, when you realize how deeply
deeply individualized this is and subjective and personal, I'll never
forget when Jamie Sheridan, the great actor he played Fortinbrass
and the production that pap did of Hamlet?

Speaker 2 (10:37):
Where is that the Diane ve noora one that thank you,
This is really a treat we're gonna be come back
with through two episodes.

Speaker 1 (10:43):
No, seriously, because because Diane Venora plays the first female.
Hammi Joe puts it right. I wish, I wish I
saw it. She was magical. Yeah, she was absolutely wonderful.
She was the fact that she didn't go on from
bird and have a great she played his wife right
with Forrest Whitaker. Yeah, now she does this and and
when everybody's dead at the end, and she comes on
and Jamie Sherion plus Fort and Bruston comes in and
just the honor in his voice of a dead soldier,

(11:06):
soldier to so he comes from the Battley comes in.
He goes, oh, proud death, and he's kind of eulogizing
in his ordinary statement of this. And I started sobbing
when he said this, And whenever I think about it,
I could have pushed me over the edge because it
was so rich in that there was a context. I
got it.

Speaker 2 (11:22):
Yeah, I mean one of the weird things. And people
said this happened at the actors studio. Maybe you witnessed
it as well, that there could be a certain fetishization
of crying, right, It's like you just the actors just
really wanted to cry. And I think that's really fascinating
because first of all, it is totally possible to be
filled with devastating sadness and not cry. There are all
sorts of people who don't cry that much. To cry
or try not to cry is always more interesting than

(11:43):
crying on camera or on stage, right, whether.

Speaker 1 (11:45):
It's worth the take, it's the playing against right.

Speaker 2 (11:47):
And then the other thing is that there are all
sorts of things that we respond to with tears that
aren't necessarily sad, because again, emotion is so individuated. And
I think part of what Strasburg, the thing that Strasburg
was getting at that I think is really key and
why it was so revolutionary, you know, that is the
idea that each person responds differently to everything. And so

(12:09):
if you want to be not cliched, you need to
harness what's individual about you and figure out a way
to put it into the character. Because the way that
you know, Alec Baldwin tries not to cry and then
cries is different from the way that I would.

Speaker 1 (12:23):
What's one thing you thought about? I mean, because you
were acting and you talk about it well, First of all,
talk about that when you go back into your college
dormitory room and have a mini nervous breakdown after some
of the work you did. Oh my God.

Speaker 2 (12:33):
That was the experience that it didn't put me off
acting in terms of my interest in acting, but it
made me realize I was not actually tough enough to
be an actor. And I think we think a lot
of times of actors as not particularly tough people.

Speaker 1 (12:45):
But there's a.

Speaker 2 (12:46):
Unique toughness that being an artist requires, and there's a
unique toughness that being an actor requires, which has to
do with being vulnerable and then not vulnerable. You know,
you have to open yourself up to the world and
you have to be able to shut it out. You
have to be able to get up in front of
people an audition and you know, deal with that rejection
and humiliation over and over again. And you also have
to be able to do this thing where, particularly if

(13:08):
you're going in a kind of Methody Stanislavsky direction, you
know you are plumbing often in a play, if it's
a deep play, a serious play, into the shit, and
you have to be able to get out of it.
You have to be able to turn it off, you
have to be able to walk away with it. And
this is an example when I couldn't really do that.
I it was my freshman year of college. I had
had a couple years of kind of Stanislavsky ish education

(13:31):
at like an acting conservatory run by a local theater
in DC. And I had been a professional actor as
a kid, so, you know, I thought I was going
to do that would you do as a kid?

Speaker 1 (13:40):
I was.

Speaker 2 (13:41):
I did voiceover for an industrial or two. I was
in a couple musicals and a play and stuff like that.
I was in the musical Falsettos, playing Jason the twelve
year Old Boy, if you know that show. I was
in a musical about the AIDS Quilt that then performed
at like the Smithsonian. Do you remember when the AIDS
Quilt came to d C. Yeah, yeah, so we performed
as part of that. We were also at the University
of Maryland. And it was a life changing experience. Among

(14:03):
other things that it is what politicized me. I mean,
growing up in DC, you're always political, yeah yeah, but
but in this case it was, you know, working in
the theater and knowing gays and lesbians, knowing people with AIDS,
you know, who are my friends?

Speaker 1 (14:18):
Yeah, yeah, me too. And started in the business of
the eighties, it was all just royaling then, yeah, exactly.

Speaker 2 (14:24):
That was really life changing. I started going to protest,
so I started really caring, you know, about something. And
so anyway, when we get to college, I was at Vassar,
I was, you know, a month into school or whatever,
and I got cast as the lead in Eric Bagosian's
Talk Radio. And uh, for anyone listening to this who
doesn't know Talk Radio the play, the movie's actually kind
of wonderful.

Speaker 1 (14:45):
It's very panematic. I forgot that you're in that's so funny.
Sign of age.

Speaker 2 (14:50):
No, I just think of it as just as just
Eric bagoshin and you sort.

Speaker 1 (14:54):
Of forget play the station manager to do or no, no,
you're the station manager right right. Obviously not memorable. But again,
it's been a while since I've seen because I have
a traumatic relationship to this material. So I haven't seen
the movie in a while.

Speaker 2 (15:05):
And so for those of you who don't know the play,
if you're playing the Eric Bagosian part and Talk Radio,
you are on stage chain smoking for ninety minutes and
then you have a three page long nervous breakdown. That's
the arc of the character, right. And so it was
two student directors, bless their souls, didn't know what they
were doing, and so I just went. Really I used
everything I knew about how to go deep into the

(15:26):
self right, which was not enough to be able to
control what I was messing with. I was messing with
dark forces that you know, like a like an apprentice wizard,
do you know what I mean. It's like, you know,
Mickey causing all the yeah and the brooms are just
all my self hatred. And on top of that, I'm
literally chainsmoking during the play. And I was a half
a pack a day smoker at the time. I've quit

(15:48):
for over twenty years now, but I was smoking like
a pack and a half cigarettes on stage. So I
was making myself physically and mentally ill on stage at
the same time every night, and you know, like the
performance would end, and you know, there was this girl
I had a crush on, and I made sure she
came and saw the show, and the only thing she
said to me afterwards was I'm worried about you, right,
And I would just go home and I smelled terrible,

(16:10):
and I hated myself because the character hates himself, that's
the core of that character. And I would literally stare
at the painted white or probably beige center block wall
of my seven x ten dorm room, and I would
just fucking stare at that wall until I could feel
myself come back together, like I had obliterated myself and
I had to come back together. And one week of
that was enough for me. I was like, I can't

(16:31):
believe anyone does this all the time for a living. Now,
the truth of the matter is, you actually get a
lot of training, and you learn how to do that
without destroying yourself.

Speaker 1 (16:39):
Or you don't. You develop a drinking probably, and it's
called acting. Yeah, exactly.

Speaker 2 (16:44):
And so I was like, you know what, I can't
do this. And then I realized that I really liked
telling people what to do, and I knew a lot
about theater, and so I should try directing. And so
I called my parents to tell them this, Hey, I
don't think I'm an actor anymore. I think I'm a director.
And it was exactly like a coming out scene from
like an early nineties play, do you know what I mean?

(17:04):
They were like, well, do you think this is just
a phase? And I was like, no, I think this
is for keeps, you know. They're like, well, you know,
you might go back to it sometimes, like I don't know,
you know, It's exactly like that, and then I.

Speaker 1 (17:13):
Didn't think they would disappoint somewhat of you giving up acting. Well,
they had been so supportive of act. You've done it
for a while. I've done it for a while, and it.

Speaker 2 (17:20):
Really saved my life. I was in a really bad
place when I got cast in that play as a
twelve year old. I was I was bullied a lot
as a kid. It wasn't physical, but it was very
you know. That's where all those brooms came from. That
I Mickey style called up. I was bullied a lot
as a kid, and I just you know, and theater
had really saved my life, and so I think they
were worried that I was too casually throwing any siblings. Yeah,

(17:40):
I have three siblings. I have three siblings. I have
an older brother, an older sister, and a younger brother.
My older two siblings both went to boarding school, so
they were kind of out of the house by the
time I was, you know, ten or whatever.

Speaker 1 (17:51):
They were smoking a pack and a half a day. And yeah,
exactly exactly. And then many of them in the business
and entertainment.

Speaker 2 (17:58):
No, no, no, not no, my younger but well, my
younger brother's a like works for a nonprofit now doing
a library stuff and educational stuff for kids. And so
I told them, you want to go to directing. I
told him I wanted to go in directing, and I
just started doing it all the time. I became like
a directing monster. And I loved it. I absolutely loved it.
And also I felt like I could help actors, having

(18:21):
gone through that experience and having had some training, you know,
I could work with them in a way to try
to bring out the best of them, in a way
that wasn't abusive. It was about creating a welcoming room.

Speaker 1 (18:30):
So being a facilitator became more important to you. It did. Yeah,
that was the opposite in the sense that I directed
one film, and it was. It was a horrible experience
from a financial standpoint and from a business and production stamp.
But what did you realize as a director that you
liked about directing? Because I hated having to control other
actors into doing what I wanted them to do.

Speaker 2 (18:49):
No, I will say that part of it eventually grew tiring,
do you know what I mean? But I loved the
sense of community. I loved the sense of all of us. Yeah,
and I loved it film. Yeah, And I loved the
thing the thing I miss because there's there's things about
directing I don't miss, right, the thing I'm having to
tricks other people out of money and twelve people into
coming into a room so that I can practice my art.

Speaker 1 (19:11):
You know.

Speaker 2 (19:11):
Now, all I need is a pen and a piece
of paper, and I'm practicing my heart, you know, Like
that was that was the grind. The professional grind is
the part that really wore me down. But to me,
the pleasure of like everyone thinking together in a room
and solving these problems in real time, in physical space,
in community together was so beautiful when it worked. It

(19:33):
doesn't always work, but it was so beautiful when you
got there that it was worth the times where it
was like, oh, this one actor is actually I didn't
realize it, but they're drunk, you know, and they're calling
me at three in the morning because they drink two
bottles of wine when they come home from rehearsal, and
they have lots of notes.

Speaker 1 (19:46):
You know.

Speaker 2 (19:46):
It's like it was you know that happened to me
once I escape, it was it was worth putting up
with that to get to this other thing, and that
was really beautiful and I loved working with writers on
their plays. Is before I realized that I was a writer.
I loved giving, you know, giving no and hearing their
notes to me and having them in the room. And
it's just kind of, you know, idea of a community
of people making each other's ideas better.

Speaker 1 (20:11):
Author Isaac Butler. If you enjoy conversations about acting and
the performing arts, check out my episode with Ellen Burston
and Estelle Parsons celebrating the seventy fifth anniversary of the
Actor's Studio.

Speaker 3 (20:26):
And I say to Peter, the director, Peter, I have
eight different things to go through here and no line.
And he smiles like the cheshire cat and says, I know.
I said, well, am I supposed to do that?

Speaker 1 (20:42):
He said, think.

Speaker 3 (20:44):
The thoughts of the character, and the camera will read
your mind. That's the best advice and the director ever
gave me.

Speaker 1 (20:55):
To hear more of my conversation with Ellen Burston and
Estelle Parsons, go to Here's the Thing dot Org. After
the break, Isaac Butler talks about acting training today and
his conversation with Ellen Burston on young actors. I'm Alec

(21:26):
Baldwin and this is Here's the Thing, Isaac Butler has
directed numerous productions throughout his theater career, including classic Shakespeare
performances and new original works such as Real Enemies and
The Trump Card. I wanted to know what pieces Isaac
Butler had most enjoyed directing and what he would like

(21:47):
to direct in the future. I don't know that.

Speaker 2 (21:51):
They're probably not plays that anyone will have heard of
because they were in you know, they were off off Broadway,
their in basement. So now I think if I was
to direct again, it's actually, you know, classics I would
want to do, or or lost backlist plays or whatever.

Speaker 1 (22:03):
I mean.

Speaker 2 (22:03):
You know, I teach Shakespeare. I loved Shakespeare. I'd love
to take another crack at Shakespeare. Haven't done that.

Speaker 1 (22:07):
I haven't directed a Shakespeare play since college. You know.
There's the Williams O'Neill's Shaw. Yeah, I mean, I love
all that stuff.

Speaker 3 (22:13):
Shaw.

Speaker 1 (22:13):
It's very hard.

Speaker 2 (22:14):
I do not actually feel like I have the background
to do Shaw, but I love all of that stuff.
You know, there's a lot of this. Last semester I
taught New American plays of the twenty first century, so
it was only plays that had been done since the
change of the millennium. At NYU. It was a dramatic
literature class, but four Tish kids, right, And it was
really fun to revisit those. And there were some of
them where I was like, I would I would love

(22:36):
to take a crack at this play. And then there
were others where I was like, this play is too hard.
I don't even know how they did it. What I
especially loved, actually was when you were doing the second
production of a new play, you know, like you had
worked on it in a workshop or whatever, and you
would learned all this stuff about it, and then you
actually got to use what you learned, which came back
you know, which doesn't necessarily happen if you direct, you know,

(22:57):
if you direct a view from the bridge or what ever,
it's like, who knows what.

Speaker 1 (23:01):
You told me? When I interviewed him about him doing
repeated productions of Salamea and The Mammot American Buffalo, speaking
of which I'm wondering, you're gonna know that Glengarry's on
Broadway right now? What do you think of Mammot and
his very arch, very mammot. I watched an interview with
him the other day, really, and he was talking to somebody.
He says you know when someone comes in there. You
know he didn't say this, but it was along the

(23:23):
lines of, you know, the guy comes in and he's
your friend, Jeff's got a cast on, and you say,
oh my god, what happened? What do you need to
prepare for that? But he's not understanding is you don't
have to prepare for it, for a lot of it.
But there are things you do have to prepare for,
much of which contextually is not in Mammot's pieces. People
aren't going through and e canthartic emotional experiences Mammot's pieces
all or it's cut. What's that film? Maintain you and

(23:46):
his ex wife Lindsay Kraut House of House of Games?
So House of Games. When I see that movie, even then,
I thought to myself, well, this is obviously a kind
of an experiment in the theater. I mean, you're having
everybody flatten out all those lines. No, Bob, No, I
won't do that. I won't do that because and the
cadence and the rhythms of it are something that is
so arch.

Speaker 2 (24:04):
But if you watch like State and Maine, which has
you know you're in it, Philip Seymour Hoffman's in it,
w H.

Speaker 1 (24:09):
Macy is in it.

Speaker 2 (24:10):
You know, there's actors who have a lot of experience,
who work at a very high level, and they can
really playfully bring those lines to life in a way
that not every actor can, using the true and false
that's the name of his acting book, using that sort
of true and false methodology. It is also true that,
like you said, it's like, you know, his language, his
dialogue is incredibly stripped away. It's it's very you know,

(24:35):
not only is everything you need in it, but he
hasn't given you anything else.

Speaker 1 (24:39):
No, do you know what I mean? Bob enters, Bob,
what time is it? Exactly? No, Bob wearing a beautiful
cream colored suede jack, none of that shit?

Speaker 2 (24:47):
Or what would those those those you mentioned Shaw? You know,
Shaw's stage directions are like seven pages long. It's like
Bob was born on a cow farm and you're like,
what the you know, O'Neill does that lactose exactly? Any
Latergin does that too. His stage directions are very novelistic, you.

Speaker 1 (25:03):
Know, not that, but it's not really very useful.

Speaker 2 (25:05):
Well yeah, I mean it depends, right. I mean I
think they're useful for him in creating the characters. I
think that if you try to do a lot of
you know, fruit for All or whatever you want to
say with Mammot's lines, it's going to be a disaster.
It makes sense why he doesn't like that stuff, do
you know what I mean? But if you try to
do the incredibly stripped away Mammity way of doing Fagan

(25:25):
or Shakespeare or whatever it's going to be, that's also
going to be a disaster.

Speaker 1 (25:28):
You're right, it would apply obviously to his his text
because I think that, you know, actors can bring in
my time of doing this, they can bring ideas, and
you have to just understand how much of your ideas welcome.
Like if I were ever to work for Spielberg, let's
say it's a salute and yes sir and no sir,
because I'm very confident, I'm supremely confident he knows exactly
what he wants. But what I also do with people

(25:49):
is don't tell. I don't talk. I say, let me
show you, right, show, not tell. I'm going to go out.
And but we got everything as written, you're happy, you
got what you want. Let's just do one more take
and I'll show you a little idea I had nothing
that changes the set or the budget or so forth
of the casting. It's all inside that template. But I
really really have become more subtle, but more and more

(26:09):
management and collaborating with them, because I think that a
lot of younger directors today, it's not so much that
they don't know what good acting is, not that they
don't know what they want. The thing they're lacking, it's
going to sound strange maybe is they lack the ability
to communicate it to you. Right, they kind of know
what they want, They kind of have an idea what
they want. They can't get it out to you and

(26:30):
make you understand that a way that's practical to you
to speak actor, which I hate that idea. I said
to this one director, I goes, tell me the story
of your movie. Tell it to me as a story.
What happens. There's the longest spouse you could ever imagine.
He goes, Oh wow, man, he goes, I don't think
I could do that. That's wild. We're fucked.

Speaker 2 (26:46):
Yeah, you know, there's it's an interesting iadd for a
director once, and you know, the thing he didn't really
do tablework. You know, they weren't sitting all around people
weren't sitting around making little backslashes in their script for
the beat marks or you know, he just he didn't
want to be intellectual about it, right, And part of
what you're talking about here is that you want to
avoid over intellectualizing your choices. You don't want to get
into a long, wordy, intellectual conversation with a director. Yeah,

(27:08):
but also you.

Speaker 1 (27:09):
Wanted that day's work and get it done.

Speaker 2 (27:10):
But it's it's it's so much easier actually to show
the director than it is for you to get into
an abstract conversation about, well, what if what he really
wants here is blah blah blah blah blah, when actually
what you're going to do is emphasize a different word.
Just emphasize a different word, you know. And what he
did instead of tablework was he was like, I just
want us to go around and say, beat by beat,
what happens in the play? No, no feelings, right, Like,

(27:31):
never say he feels blah blah blah, Just what does
each person do? That was all the book work we did.
I know that, but you know what, it was really
hard to just do that. You get so wrapped up
and he feels X I did the.

Speaker 1 (27:40):
Carol Churchill play Serious Money and Love Love Them, but
someone's got to do that play again. It's nine eighty eight.
And then did we did the American Company and they'd
come here to the public with Gary Olb and Fred
Molina to play the two lead roles. So I replaced
Gary and we go to Broadway. This would when Pap
Joe Papp was in that mood he head periodically to
force write certain cultural Is that Max Stafford clarkter Bravo,

(28:04):
thanks you. Yeah. So Max Stafford Clark who says to
me one time, he who says to all of us
were at the table, Kate Nelligan and all these other people,
and he says, he says, I want you to write
down along the margins of your scripts a transitive verb
what you're trying to do in that scene. And then
he sat with us, all one by one and he
sat there with me and he goes, now this line here,
what do you think you're trying to do there? And

(28:25):
I go, I don't know. Encourage He goes no, I
go seduce no. And finally he goes and he goes,
I've got it. Enlist You're trying to enlist them into
your cause and I go, that's great, enlist I write,
and we had to do that for every line. Yeah.

Speaker 2 (28:41):
He called that actioning, and that is Stanislavskis script analysis.
That's a very basic thing Stella Adler taught her students
to do that. You do it as an infinitive verb
with Stella, But that was a very Stanislavsky script analysis
thing that like, every line has an action behind it,
and that's the thing you're trying to do. And so
write it down as you know, to enlist, to enlist,
and try to keep those you know, those words, be

(29:02):
really specific and keep the stake.

Speaker 1 (29:04):
It was a great director. So as you as you
come into this business, as actors come into this business,
and writers and directors and everybody having consumed a diet
of other material. I watched films as a child. I
was obsessed with films. There was no cable back then,
no streaming nowadays. What people have out there to bathe in,
to lather their body with and to try to get
some essence of the of what movies are in acting

(29:26):
is just abysmal. I call it the training table of donuts.

Speaker 2 (29:30):
Well, it's interesting that you say that, because you know
I do often use the food metaphor when talking about
one's cultural diet, right, and then it's like, you know,
I like donuts. There's nothing wrong with having a donut,
do you know what I mean? Medoships, Yeah, but a
diet that was all donuts, I think we would all agree.

Speaker 1 (29:44):
The other are in the potato chip business right now.

Speaker 2 (29:45):
Yeah, yeah, I mean there's a lot of kind of
flooding the zone with hastily made violent violent. That acting
is often very kind of surface y, you know, there's
nothing required of it, there's nothing required of them. I
remember who was I talking to, may have actually been
Ellen Burston and I were talking at one point. She
was talking about how little training a lot of the
people she, you know, the younger actors she was working with, have,

(30:07):
and she's like, you know, it's enough to get you
a Netflix show, but it's not enough to make you
a good actor, which I think the way that she
phrased it, people today don't care about being a good actress. Yeah, yeah, no,
I mean some people do. And I think those people
who really care, I think.

Speaker 1 (30:20):
That that they're less than before.

Speaker 2 (30:22):
Totally totally, but like you know, my students, anytime I
mentioned a movie this. I had a really great group
of students this semester. They blew my mind with how
amazing they was a school at YU. Are you a Titian?

Speaker 1 (30:33):
Yeah, are you really?

Speaker 2 (30:34):
I'm in the dramatic studies departments. It's like the liberal
arts part of the theater degree. So undergraduate for undergrads,
for the for the BFA programming. Yeah.

Speaker 1 (30:41):
In your bick with they mentioned that new school.

Speaker 2 (30:43):
That's because when the book was published, I was at
the new school and she started just recently, like a
couple years ago.

Speaker 1 (30:47):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (30:47):
Yeah, and so they, you know, any time not just me,
but anyone in class mentioned a movie that they hadn't
heard of, they wrote it down. I saw them do it.
Paths of Glory, write it down that Paths of Glory
is an incredible movie. We could turn this into your class. Yeah,
I'll come visit your class please.

Speaker 1 (31:02):
Dude. Oh, I'd love to tell my view of movies
they should watch to improve their acting. Yeah. Yeah, no exactly.

Speaker 2 (31:07):
And so you know, I do think there are people
who are hungry for that, just like I think that
like when you eat only junk food, like it's fun
for a while, but you do get to a point
where You're like, am I poisoning myself?

Speaker 1 (31:16):
Or this is wrong? But I think the business itself
is not encouraging people to appreciate a history film acting,
and so for the film in general, from an historical perspective.
You go out there. Now, there are films now that
when the Oscar you would never watch a second time.
Oh yeah, that never never.

Speaker 2 (31:34):
I mean I am such a big fan of the
Criterion Channel that I just started pitching them until they
let me do things my Criterion lists.

Speaker 1 (31:39):
Oh great, I did my Criterion list of ten movies.
That's great.

Speaker 2 (31:42):
I'm actually doing an event with them tonight where I'm
the interviewer. So the interviewing Brian Cox.

Speaker 1 (31:47):
No, yeah, yeah, yeah, it's good. I worked with Cox.
Hell the Nuremberg Trials for TT. Yes, he talks about it,
and he plays Goebbels, Yes, he plays Gourbls. And you
were the prosecutor, right, I was a Jackson, the judge
who was sent by Roosevelt to go over there in
form the ural right, right, amazing? Yeah.

Speaker 2 (32:02):
He talks about that in his in his memoir and
finding that role. And you know, how was it that
Goring was able to sort of tap dance around the
people asking him questions and you know, so how to
get into the psychology of that person without judgment because
you have to bring them to life.

Speaker 1 (32:15):
And of course you see guys like them score late
in their career. He did that succession. They're going to
gasp of a look at him doing this TV show
and just running the ball all over one hundred yards
down the sideline with that. I mean, he was really
really took a lot of chances and he was great
in that show.

Speaker 2 (32:30):
I mean there's decades of history, right, decades of roles
in that role, in getting in getting the logan, you know,
in getting the logan role, And.

Speaker 1 (32:36):
How are you going to play those roles if you're
not playing the roles for decades. I always say to people,
I say, just give yourself a couple of years in
the theater when you graduate, right, because if you graduate
from college and you have a degree granting program from
a university, I'm not so sure that the acting part
of that is that pungent and that good. If you
want to go to class and work in a classroom
for another year or two, great, But after two years

(32:58):
of classroom acting, you're going to become clas get the
fuck out of there and go and audition for shows,
and you know in a show.

Speaker 2 (33:04):
Bobby Lewis was very worried about that with regards to
the Actors Studio. You know, he felt like there were
a lot of people with good reason. Yeah, you know
Bobby Lewis who was one of the founders of the
Actors Studio, and then he and Kazan got into a
He and Kazan had a falling out as Kazan was
one to do with various people, and he quit the
Actors Studio. And that's actually why Kazan brought Lee Strasburgh in,

(33:25):
because Kazan had originally iced Lee Strasburg out of the
studio and did not want him involved because he had
so they had sort of a father son drama relation,
kind of very dramatic relationship, and so that's how he
brought Lee in and how Lee wound up taking over
the Actors Studio. So a few years after that, almost
Lewis gives this series of lectures called Method or Madness,
which are collected in a book that isn't it's out

(33:46):
of print, but it is one of the most extraordinary
books about acting and in the Method or Madness lectures,
Bobby Lewis says the problem with acting class and he
says this as an acting teacher, is that you get
stuck in classroom acting. You only know how to do
scene study, you don't know how to do you know,
you only know how to do the big moments. But actually,
like seventy five percent of the actor's job is like,

(34:06):
how do you pour a picture of glass of water
out of a picture?

Speaker 1 (34:10):
Nothing? How do you do nothing and be comfortable with me? Listen? Right?

Speaker 2 (34:13):
It's like, you know, there's that sort of running joke
within the industry that we all know of the background
actor who does too much because they know they're being
observed by the camera and so like, I can't do
it because background actors can't talk, they're not allowed to.
But they're making lots of faces, they're pointing there. Yeah,
I mean there's an amazing Saturday Night Live sketch about
that with I think Fred Armison and Sherry Oh Terry,
and you know, it's that thing of like how do

(34:34):
you actually just be when you know you're being observed?
So simply and Strasburg actually had a lot of exercises
for that private moment. I'm sure you've had to do
private moment in your time or some dance and stuff
like that, and how do you And those were all
designed to make you forget that the audience was there, right,
But then you get to scene study and you're just
doing the huge moments you never loved me mom right,

(34:56):
as opposed to the like, oh your arm's broken.

Speaker 1 (35:02):
Author Isaac Butler, if you're enjoying this conversation, tell a
friend and be sure to follow Here's the Thing on
the iHeartRadio app, Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts.
When we come back, Isaac Butler talks about the original
disciples of method acting and his thoughts on actors like

(35:23):
Marlon Brando and al Pacino. I'm Alec Baldwin and this
is Here's the thing. Isaac Butler's book The Method chronicles

(35:44):
the history of Stanislavsky's method of acting. The book details
acting coaches such as Stella Adler and Lee Strasberg, who
refashioned Stanislavsky's method for the next generation of actors. Both
Stanislavsky and Strasburg would often say that the actor can
only be ninety percent of the character. I was curious

(36:06):
as to whether or not Isaac. But the regrees with
this statement. It's actually impossible to fully become the character.
That's madness.

Speaker 2 (36:14):
I mean, if you were to fully become Hamlet before
me right now, well, for one thing, you wouldn't be
speaking an iambic pentameter. That doesn't make any sense because
no one speaks an iambic pantaminter. But also instead of
being able to cross the stage or whatever, you just
be like, holy shit, my uncle killed my father.

Speaker 1 (36:29):
What am I supposed to do my mother? Yeah? Yeah, exactly.

Speaker 2 (36:32):
You wouldn't be like, oh that this two two solid
flesh would melt thowed result of itself into a dw
You know, you wouldn't be doing that shit. You'd be
like comatose. So fully becoming the character is a form
of madness. Only you know that it's not actually possible.
Stanislavski's whole idea, this idea of what is translated as
experiencing the Russian word is perishavanya, this thing where it's

(36:54):
like the actor's consciousness and the character's consciousness meet and
they sort of have a baby.

Speaker 1 (36:58):
Do you know what I mean?

Speaker 2 (37:00):
That's what you're doing. You're really in the moment, you're
feeling these things. You're live to the imaginative reality. But
you're also not going to walk off the lip of
the stage and fall into the orchestra pent or whatever.
You know, you're trying to fly, yeah, yeah, yeah. And
also you're going to do the blocking you've been told
to do, you know, because you've agreed to do the blocking.

Speaker 1 (37:16):
So much of what you're doing is almost all with
few exceptions. I mean, even monologues have some context this
way with inside the play, you're performing with other people
on stage with other people. And when you do that.
What I always try to do, not even recently, from
not from the beginning, but as I was going further
and further, is what was the disposition of the character? Right?
And I always talk to people that about dispositional acting.

(37:39):
When you are you weak? Are you strong? Are you
boo Radley where everything terrifies you and you're frail and
fractal in the world and you're not brave and confident?
Are you boisterous? Are you affable and backslapping? What is
the nature of that person terms how they talk, how
they behave, are they happy, sad? Are they strong? Weak? Whatever?
You got to kind of get that adjusted. I think

(37:59):
from the The word we use is authorization. Yeah, for
that I do want. I need authorization if I go
to see a surgeon. I watched Hours of Surgery before
I did the movie Mallie, why not to study surgery?
But the point, what were the disposition of these men?
Did they really yell at nurses? Did they really throw
the instruments on the ground? Did they really play ac
DC at seven o'clock in the morning, Yes, they did.
They had to go into another zone. They had to

(38:21):
empty their mind. So then get in there and do
stept couple bypasses at SEMN I can barely watch the
Today Show at seven thirty in the morning, let alone
do fucking stept couple bypassers. You know that's interesting.

Speaker 2 (38:30):
There's this play called Men in White, which births the
hospital drama genre. Right, it's where er comes from. Really,
if you think about it and the group it's a comedy, no, no, no, no,
it's a legit play won the Pulitzer Prize. It's the
thing that put the Group Theater on the map. Lee
Strasburg directed it. Oh, the Group Theater was, of course
the company that Lee Strasburg and Harold Clerman and Cheryl
Crawford founded that all of twentieth century American acting comes

(38:52):
out of this organa Stelle is there, Bobby Lewis is there,
Kazan is there, John Garfield's there. Anyway, So they did
this play called Men and White, and they would do
these summer retreats. Most of them were juice. They were
often in the Catskills. They would do these summer retreats
where they're rehearsing these plays. Okay, so they rehearsed Men
in White and they kept doing it, and they were
sort of like, you know, they they went and they
met doctors and nurses because there were doctors and nurses

(39:14):
around this hotel, and they interviewed them and they looked
at what they did. And Lee Struser said, we're going
to learn what doctors do. Let's learn what doctors do,
and let's bring those habits into the play. And they
were doing these run throughs and they're like, something is
not working. And I think it was actually Lee who
figured this out. He's like, doctors don't reveal this much
emotion actors do. Like, doctors are actually very you know,

(39:37):
when they have a patient who's going to die that
they're worried.

Speaker 1 (39:39):
Is going to die.

Speaker 2 (39:40):
They're not like, oh my god, he's gonna die. They're like,
we're losing him. Bring me that ido the other room. Right,
they're not, And that's actually a thing. The pit is
really great at. If you've watched that TV show that
you know, there's a level of you can't get worked
up about everything. This happens to you every day. You
can't let this bobby the deck of the carrier. And
so it was through that little bit of withholding, you know,
pulling back five or ten percent on the emotionality that

(40:02):
allowed the play in its power to come to life
because they had seen how those people really work in
the world.

Speaker 1 (40:08):
Now, let's talk about in a couple of minutes we
have left about some of the disciples of method acting
that people were. I mean, I was a fan of Brando.
I was drawing. He was a beacon to me like
anybody else. But as the years went by and I
saw how much he was just sending up his career
and other people, and he was so bad. When I
tell people what's the flame? You know, when Pacina, I
mean I could cry in this when John Randol was
trying to put the shield on Pacino's chest, and surproco,

(40:30):
here's your shield, Frank, and he's like, doesn't want it
shot through the cheek. Pacino was the one that made
me want to be an actor. Brando kind of then
that ended, yes, because Brando's just you know, his antics
just turned me off, whereas Pacino was the person that
made me want to be a movie actor. What do
you think about Brando's contribution.

Speaker 2 (40:48):
Well, I mean there's a point where Brando stops doing
the wonderful thing that he can do, and it's after
the failure of One Eyed Jacks. You know, he was
so mad about how that movie had been treated, which
was his directorial debut. And you know, he always had
an ambivalent relationship acting anyway. He wanted to be a
jazz drummer. It just turned out he wasn't a genius

(41:09):
a jazz drumming. He was a genius at acting. You know,
sort of almost dragged into acting. You know, his sister
was the one who cared a lot more about being
an actor. And so there's a point where the joy
you're going to get from his performances is not the same.
You know, it's going to be like, wow, that's a
really weird choice. And sometimes it works, and that's interesting.
He did this movie called Missouri Breaks where his performance

(41:31):
is insane. I mean it is legitimate. It's actually I
find it brilliant and delightful. It is not a conventional
performance that works. He is an Irish bounty hunter and
then at one I don't know why he's doing an
Irish accent, but he has a brogue throughout it. And
then later on he disguises himself as an American and
does literally does the scene as Brando doing an Irish accent,

(41:54):
doing an American accent. It is breathtaking. It's insane. Why
would you do that. There's another scene where he's like
dress up as an old woman. It's almost like Looney Coconuto,
you know. And that movie is delightful. It's delightful. Is
that conventionally good acting?

Speaker 3 (42:08):
No.

Speaker 1 (42:09):
I think he's someone who and again the essentiality here
that he had the youth. Yeah, he had the sheen
of his youth. He's a street cud, but he's twenty
four years old on Broadway. I had the street crum
bro I was thirty. That's ten years is a huge difference.
And you were the actual age of the character when
he's too young for he was. But the thing is,
I think that he's someone who again with my lame
analogies here in metaphors, they hand him the Rubik's cube

(42:30):
when he's twenty four years old, and he looks at
it for a minute. Then he goes, zizit and he goes,
you mean like that right, and they go, oh my god.
I mean he puts the pieces together before anybody. You
have to be forty right before, you know, but the
time you old to play Hammick, you're too old to
play hamm at that old line. And he puts the
piece together while he's young and beautiful, and he got bored,
you know, I mean he got bored.

Speaker 2 (42:51):
Yeah, I mean you can see, you know, his Julius
Caesar when he plays the marc Antony, the film of
that with a John Gilgood is he's great in that.
I mean he worked as ass off that there's a
period where he's working and then he sort of stops working.
The early I am also really interested in, you know,
a couple of other of that earlier generation. One is
of course Montgomery Cliff. But the most natural screen presence

(43:12):
of that generation, I think by far, there's that idea
of public solitude. Strasburg talks about that, Stanislawski talks about
that that you're not you don't know your private or
public to be. No one is better at that than
early Montgomery Cliff. But the other one of that era
that I think, you know, I constantly talk about and
want more people to go back to is John Garfield,
who is the first method actor. He's the first actor

(43:33):
trained by Strasburg to break out in Hollywood and be
a star in his career is very sadly cut short,
but first by Hugh act and then by his death
of a heart attack after he was all but blacklisted,
and he is an extraordinary screen presence.

Speaker 1 (43:46):
In a sense, I also view method acting in the
way that was among other things in that period the fifties,
on a labor relation sense, but in a psychological sense
that method i've can become the unionization of acting. Right this,
this is what we do. We decide what we do. Yeah,
we You don't decide what we do. We'll tell you
what we do. I'm going to go to work now

(44:06):
and I'm going to educate the director. Now, We're going
to do this this way. And I found that fascinating
as it was almost like them kind of claiming in
order to do good acting, in order to do better acting,
more preciselycing, I couldn't rely on directors anymore to help
me get there. I couldn't. It's the advent of what
I call the self directing period of acting. Yeah, I
mean that makes a lot of sense, and that SUSPC.

(44:27):
I mean.

Speaker 2 (44:27):
The other thing that's happening that encourages that is, right
when method acting is emerging, the studio system is falling apart.
So you're no longer in this factory essentially making seven
movies a year like Clark Gable did.

Speaker 1 (44:38):
We're doing what they told you it was in your
interest and paid back then you know, eighteen hundred dollars
a week.

Speaker 2 (44:43):
Right, right, right, fortune, right, So you're not on salary anymore.
And one of the things that the breakup of the
studio system does is for the actors who are successful,
it empowers the actors and especially their agents. You know,
that's a huge change in the industry. When the studio
system falls apart and method acting is totally wrapped up
in that, right that it's like, well, now I actually
do want to be a serious actor. I don't want
to sign a seven year Montgomery Cliff is like, I'm

(45:05):
just going to sign a one year contract and I'm
going to go back to doing place, because doing place
what a serious actor does, and I want to be
a serious actor or you know, whatever it is that
maybe they want to live in New York, you know,
maybe they don't want to be full.

Speaker 1 (45:15):
Time in film. Finally, yeah, yeah, yeah, you know, And.

Speaker 2 (45:18):
That's that is a huge change in the industry. And
method acting is right there helping the fuel.

Speaker 1 (45:23):
In this online interview, I see a little clip of
Merrill and she's saying to somebody, you know, the condition
of the actor really is that life itself is so
unpredictable and so uncertain, but especially so for actors. Yeah,
their lives are more uncertain than the average person. Last thing,
So Angels in America, your previous books. Yes, I am
of the mind that you know. Obviously, great musicians, composers, writers,

(45:43):
and so forth have a houseyon period. Then they run
a little dry as time goes on. Now, I'm not
going to suggest that Angels in America sapped Kushner of
all of his creative abilities. That's far from true. But
you wonder, did you get the impression. You talk to
him many times, so I admire him beyond anything. He's
just the most amazing individual, one of the most amazing
people I've ever met in this business. However, I wonder

(46:06):
I sometimes look at Angels like, go, this must have
nearly killed him.

Speaker 2 (46:09):
Oh, I mean it didn't. Only yeah, I mean Angels.
The story behind Angels. You know, my co author Dan
Koyce and I it's an oral history because we were like,
there's no way that we can write better than Oscar
Eustace and Tony Kushner and Joe Mantello and all these
people can talk, you know, so we're just we're gonna
interview them, We're going to range their quotes. There's nothing
we could possibly write in a sentence as good as
something Tony says. And so we did an oral history,

(46:31):
and it's got interviews with two hundred and fifty plus
people in it. And what you learn is that that
play nearly kills anyone who comes in contact with it.
I mean, it's the mountain, it is really the mountain.

Speaker 1 (46:40):
It's Lear.

Speaker 2 (46:41):
It's fucking leir, you know, like it's actually two lears,
because it's you know, it's eight hours long and you know,
the theater company that developed Angels in America, Eureka Theater
that Tony Tacone and Oscar Eustace ran it basically went
under in the process of doing Angels. The original woman
who played the Angel died of breast cancer over the
course of developing the play.

Speaker 1 (47:00):
You know, it.

Speaker 2 (47:01):
Requires the totality of your being to do that play right,
you know, to do both parts right. It requires so
much of you, and it required so much of him
to especially finish the second part. A lot of the interviews,
the parts of it that were so difficult for him,
had to do a lot with. You know, the first
part was a huge hit, critically acclaimed, Gonna Go to Brabba.

(47:23):
He hadn'tritten the second part yet, you know, figuring out
how to finish the thing that he had started took.

Speaker 1 (47:29):
Millennium was first.

Speaker 2 (47:30):
Yeah, Millennium was first. And you know, Millennium's like a
perfect play, Like a high school production of Millennium is
still delight.

Speaker 1 (47:35):
It's not gonna be brilliant engage. You're still gonna have
a great time. You know.

Speaker 2 (47:39):
Parastrika is very hard. It's a brilliant play. It is
incredibly hard to do. If you do it right.

Speaker 1 (47:44):
It's incredibly fun.

Speaker 2 (47:45):
Wat Yeah, but it's you know, the interplay of ideas
and imagery, and it takes so much of your theatrical imagination.
And you know, for the actor playing Prior especially, it's
so hard. And part of that is because of how
difficult it was, I think for Tony to finish it,
you know, because he's a guy who you know, he
obsesses over every word. Every word has to be the
right word. You know, He's really deep in the nitty

(48:07):
gritty of everything. And that's why that took so long.
You know, Lincoln took like a decade longer than he
expected to to write, and it's because he really wants
to do right by the things he's choosing to write about.
And I just find it incredibly admirable. It is not
how I necessarily approach my own writing, but it's just
you can't argue with the results of it.

Speaker 1 (48:25):
It's so brilliant. How long did it take you to
write that book? The Angels in America book?

Speaker 2 (48:29):
It started as an article, and so the article was
originally we spent six months working on the article, and
our first draft of the article was forty thousand words long.
But when we handed in was forty thousand words long,
and they were like, are you nuts going yeah, and
so we had to cut twenty five thousand words out
of it, you know, something like that. And so the
only way we could deal with the heartbreak of that
was to be like, we're going to turn it into

(48:50):
a book.

Speaker 1 (48:51):
It'll go in the book.

Speaker 2 (48:52):
Don't worry about it, you know, don't delete it. Put
it in this file to put.

Speaker 1 (48:55):
In the book.

Speaker 2 (48:55):
And then the article was a hit when we were
able to sell it as a book, and I think
it came out a year or two later.

Speaker 1 (48:59):
How long did it you to write the method? Two
ish years? Two ish years.

Speaker 2 (49:04):
I would have maybe gotten it done a little bit
faster than that, but.

Speaker 1 (49:08):
The pandemic happened.

Speaker 2 (49:09):
The third part of the book was written mostly in
my mother in law's basement during the pandemic because we
had left the city and so we were in the
middle of nowhere in Virginia, and I was sitting in
the basement watching a movie every day. And then you know,
writing the third part. And after the book came out,
my mother in law, who I love very dearly, we
have a very good relationship. My mother in law said

(49:30):
to me. You know, when you were living in my basement,
I kept thinking, I'm watching this guy's kid, and he's
watching a goddamn movie, you know, every day, And now
I get it. Thank you very very much, Thank you
so much for having me.

Speaker 1 (49:43):
This was a joy. Yeah, my thanks to Isaac Butler.
This episode was recorded at CDM Studios in New York City.
We're produced by Kathleen Russo, Zach MacNeice, and Victoria de Martin.
Our engineer is Frank Imperial. Our social media manager is

(50:05):
Danielle Gingrich. Hi'm Alec Baldwin. Here's the Thing is brought
to you by iHeart Radio