This is Alec Baldwin and you're listening to Here's the Thing from iHeart Radio.
Whatever it is, whatever you do, You're our daughter and I will love you.
John Robin Bates has a new play on Broadway, recently nominated for a Tony. Other Desert Cities is about family dysfunction and the choices we make.
There are consequences to our actions. What does that mean? How could I trust you? How could I ever be in your presence?
My dear Robbie, as he's known to many, pursued similar themes in the drama he created an executive produced for ABC Brothers and Sisters. Robbie's strengths as a playwright magnified by the talent he surrounds himself with. Dan Sullivan directed Substance of Fire in nineteen ninety two. Joe Mantello directed Other Desert Cities. Robbie Bates often writes for specific actors he admires, like Stacy Keach and Ron Rifkin, who have
worked on several of Robbie's stage and screen projects. In the theater world, you'd be hard pressed to find someone who wouldn't want to work with Robbie. He comes across as kind, human and humble. During our conversation, he confessed there's been a dark side to his success on Broadway. He's been spoiled. John Robin Bates can barely think about going back to the smaller theaters.
I'm ruined. I'm ruined from off Broadway. Now, I sort of say things like, well, that plays an off Broadway play, it's not a Broadway play. Making fun of myself. The difference is, you know, you're in this great, great, grand old house, you know that's built for a kind of big experience, and the drama is somehow expanded. I mean, I listen. I never knew the difference, so I was.
Always and when you're there, you feel there's just a different tapestry there. When you're in a broad that lends itself to the kind of the import of the project.
Or there's a lot of different things going on. You know, the audience has bought into an experience for which they've usually sadly paid more money, and so it changes the dynamic, it changes, there's more ornamentation around it in some way. The laughs change, which is odd. The laughs are sort of bigger and more expensive inside.
So what was the arc of other desert cities before you went to Brovi.
It began where in the Mitsi New House, which is the beautiful Jewel theater in the basement of Lincoln Center.
How many seats ninety nine?
I think small, small, intimate and in fact even claustrophobic. What happened was Joe Mantello, who directed it, immediately had a sense of having to build space around things, and that when once it moved in the transfer, I actually believe the play got better in its move It just all came together and some why I did a little work on the play, And.
For example, what work did you do?
I worked a little bit on the ending of the play, the last few minutes of the play.
But it went so well off Broadway Lincoln Center. When you do that kind of thing, What is it that propels you to do that.
It's just the knowledge that there's more to mind from it. And mostly it was, you know, Joe's great sort of probing sense of I think there's a deeper truth there. I think we've glossed over something or skipped over something.
You have a success now on Broadway that if I could be mistaken, but it's been a while since you had it to this level. This is a substance of fire. Again. You know where you had great, great notices and people have said wonderful things about your career and your future. That was twenty years ago. I know when you look back on some of your players, would you change them?
I can't. I just have to keep moving forward. I can't do it. I know that people do, but you know I can't fight old wars. I would find it disablingly backwards looking for myself to go back. I think some of my plays have been less successful to me than others. And to me, it's all been about the process of getting to the next play or getting to
the next day. This play, though at the core of it, it comes out of trying to understand the ways in which people collapse, even though the subject is not necessarily depression.
I want to take two plays substance of Fire. Sullivan directed and now You're on Broadway and had been at the Midsia with other Desert Cities, and Joe directed. Compare and contrast Sullivan with Joe in terms of the direct Yeah.
They're very similar. Yeah, they are meticulous, meticulous miniaturists with big, expansive visions of what logic and a world are comprised of. They're both indefatigable. They never give up, they live and breathe it. Their approaches are very different. Dan has a kind of almost holistic view of the logic of a play, and Joe because I don't know, maybe because he was an actor for a long time. Even though Dan had been an actor, Joe looks for a different kind of
character logic. He's always asking and what happens next. Dramaturgically, he's very much about the engine and the motor and Dan is, well, he's also actually, he's actually all there. If they're so similar that it's only a matter of their temperaments that are different.
How are they different? Dan is like a priest.
Yeah, he's more jesuitical.
And then tell her was what to the extent that you want to say.
He's passionately, passionately dedicated to leaving no stone unturned. And I think one of the reasons he went back to acting this last year did The Normal Heart on Broadway, and I think it's because he had to re experience the sort of dynamic of what it means to be an actor, to get under the skin of the experience and find out what kind of communicator he is with actors by acting again, Dan has a kind of remove about him, and Joe tends to delve, oh sort of
with sword kind of play vistal play. Yeah, but they both have in common is real rigor about their work, ethic and their intellectual understanding of a subject of a world.
Sometimes, although it's not always useful, I divide directors between directors that you want to please because you want them to like you, and directors that you want to please because you don't want them to hate you. And I don't think I need to tell you which one would be which in this case, you know, because Joe seems so intense. It just seems so smoldering all the time.
Well he is he No, he wants you to show him. He doesn't want to have to tell you what to do. He wants you to bring something amazing to the table every day. It's why one loves, for instance, our mutual friend Nathan Nathan Lane, because every day he brings something new, what they call a money player.
Many people, I think don't understand, and this is not always the case, that the theatrical experience movies are very, very different. When you work with a director in the theater. A lot of them don't tell you this or that they edit.
You know.
The most famous example who I love is Joey Tillinger who Tillinger basically says nothing for the three weeks, and then in the last week he selects my recollection of Joey was it was three weeks of me doing something. I'd say, what do you think? He can say, what do you think, Bavid? Do you think it was?
I just I can't do it that way. I see it as all about stripping away and finding the kind of improvisitory freedom that's locked in the text, and that involves a combination of savviness and analysis and getting off book really fast and being able to move around really fast, and then setting.
Joe I'm told is a stickler for that get off book well exact, because nothing really happens until you do.
Yeah, it's difficult.
Well, especially in a world now, where as I recall, you used to have five weeks a rehearsal for a straight play, we've gone to a four week rehearsal. Four weeks that goes by like you sneeze.
I like shorter rehearsals with Bob falls. Another great director. I did three hotels this last summer at Williamstown with more Tyrney and Stephen Weber, and they had two and a half weeks Everything is Dangerous two and a half weeks.
Tell me about when a play like Substance of Fire? How did that come to you?
You know, it's interesting to sad that play and this play share something in common. They came out of despair. They both out of trying to write myself out of a kind of real sense of despondency and loss.
And to the extent you want to talk about it, what was the despondency? Back in ninety one.
I had been working on a play for a long time that was eventually became a play called A Fair Country, but at the time it was called Dutch Landscape. And I worked on an impossible play to do when you're young, about growing up. Did it at the Taper in Los Angeles, and I lost the play. I actually lost it, you know, in rehearsal and development through nobody's fault, you know, certainly
not Gordon Davidson's who directed it. If anybody was at fault, if you can even use that word, because it's it's theater.
It was me.
I was just in despair over how did I let this happen to me? I used to work at book Soup in Hollywood, and I I urrowed the office above book Soup to try and figure out. You know, I was no longer working there. So I was sitting up in this office above the store, and I was surrounded by books, and I thought, oh, yeah, I've read all of you. I've read you uu u u u you, and none of you did me any good whatsoever. I don't know how to fight. First line of substance fiers.
Look at all these books. The play is about learning how to fight and articulating the things you need, articulating the ways in which you have to express yourself in order to somehow achieve a kind of victory that goes beyond words.
What's isaac victory?
Isaac doesn't really have a victory in an odd kind of way. He goes down with his own ship, but he's unyielding. And I think I tried to learn how to be unyielding, and writing that play it didn't do me much good. Why well, because life is life and plays or plays, and you can't actually learn that much by writing them. You have to live.
Do you find that in the ensuing years you wind up going up against things that just crush you so right, they crush you as you realize that. I'm not going to compare battles with television networks with going through the Holocaust. But on the other hand, the Isaac character, there are some people who they are just incapable of the happiness that leads to real intimacy because there's something that just cannot get over.
I think it's very true, totally true of that character. And in his case, he has very little choice. He's locked in battle with this melancholia that won't lift.
Which I think people don't have a real honest understanding about. They don't know what it's like to be betrayed on like the ninth level, you know, something really hideous.
I think despair is the demension of one's despair are so difficult to quantify, so difficult to paint, so difficult to expose, and it's such a huge subject. Certainly, other desert cities is steeped in despair. You know, you say, talk about network battles, but I sort of, you know, was ejected from my one adventure in television up to that point, I was creating brothers and sisters, and it
was a very unhappy, very difficult experience for me. And again at the end of that thing, I sort of I came back east, you know, after having been west.
For a little bit. What was the first thing you wrote after that?
There are three plays in my drawer because I had forgotten how to write that. This is the thing I think about with other desert cities is it's the play where I learned. I taught myself how to write again because I was so you to writing to please people.
What happened with ABC, Well, first of all, networks being what they are, the people who commission the piece and are invested in putting it on the air end up leaving, and so you're left with a kind of in a kind of parents and not necessarily particularly.
Caring support of step parents.
Slightly bewildered. I mean, the guy who really ran the entertainment division kept saying, I don't understand why anybody watches this show, and I would say the same thing, except for different reasons. I mean, it was really it was bizarre. He would call me and scream at me. I actually said to him, I don't know who you think you're talking to and I would, you know, politely hang up
and say I'm leaving the conversation now. At one point I said to them, don't you feel like there's something wrong? I mean, look at this amazing cast, Sally Field, Callista Flockhart, Rachel Griffith, Ron Rifkin, Patty Wedding, on and on and on. Don't you think there should be some higher intention, some integrity, maybe some I don't know, do you want do you want to try and get an Emmy or something. I didn't even know how to speak their language, but I
thought Emmy would be something that they would recognize. And a literal quote from the head of the studio was, no, I don't need awards. The ratings are good enough for me.
This happens in the first season, the first season. Yeah, and you are gone after how many seasons after the first season?
Oh?
Yeah, So all this takes place in one television season. He has one nine month period.
Yes, you know, someone comes in to sort of manage the show, and they're beholden to the network in the studio as they should be. And I'm beholden to an aesthetic and I'm an idiot for being beholden to an aesthetic. But you know, people love the show. It went on for another four seasons after.
That, and you maintained some participation in the show. You how was that possible? You created the show, You were the creator of the show. Correct.
There was a writer's strike, and there was a force masure clause force masure being active. God, the studio network could use that clause to nullify any contract they had with anybody they liked. I had been very vocal during that strike about what I considered at the time the very unhealthy dynamic between the producers and the writer's guild. And I wrote about this way too much, was it?
What was the name of those blogs you wrote on Huffington Post leaving La Yeah, a lot of them were very insanely painful and actually lead to again other deserts cities.
The girl in the play can't stop writing about things that affected other people, and.
She wants some truth.
Yeah, and then she's left with the debris. So it all came out of you know, I pick up the phone one day and I see that, you know, people's deals are being canceled, but there are people who haven't made anything, And I suddenly I was gone, and I even before that, wasn't sure to what extent I was ever going to go back. I knew I would have some involvement, but then I had none whatsoever.
And for me, what's curious, And again you don't have to answer this question. I'm just curious, which is, as the creator of a television show, there is typically a windfall for that person is the creative that show. If that was taken away from you, and through some contractual slide of hand, where did all that go? All went to the network? They took it all for themselves.
I can't speak to that. I'm just not going to talk about them, but I am going to say that I think it was the best thing that ever happened to me, because it would have been dirty money, right. I think it would have destroyed me in some way.
To have no pride in the thing that made me wealthy would have made me terribly uncomfortable, and I would have felt that I'd betrayed whatever promise or potential I'd set up for myself as a writer that if I was going to survive at it, it couldn't be compromised.
This is Alec Baldwin, and I'm talking with playwright John Robin Bates more in a minute. We're taking a break. Stay with us. This is Alec Baldwin and you're listening to Here's the Thing. The idea for John Robin Bates's new play, Other Desert Cities came to him when he was back on the East Coast.
I was sitting at a beach with my notebook, and I'm thinking about how to get back into it and what matters to me, and I just sort of self destructed at Brothers and Sisters. I had written about personal events that implicated other people in some way that I hadn't taken into account the consequences. And I found myself very much like the character in my play played by Beth Marvel and Rachel Griffith at various points, a writer
who is a dangerous creature. And I had a note to myself play about daughter of a famous family who writes a book about her growing up in this family, something like that, the danger of telling the truth that turns out.
To be a lie.
And at that moment, this lady of a certain age walked by me, and she looked to me like Pat Buckley, the old doyenne of New York conservative politics, the wife of Bill Buckley. Bill Buckley, and I had lunch with her once and found her to be charming and engaged. And this woman walked by me on this beach with
her hat and in a one piece bathing suit. I immediately felt the mother in that play, and I suddenly remembered old California the way it was when I was a kid, and we were just in the throes of an election at the time, too were about to be and the Republicans, certainly of that period and even more so today, were very confusing to me because they didn't seem recognizable to me as having a coherent, cohesive cog and argument for their principled positions, which had to be
principled in some way. The play just came together in one fell swoop. California Conservatives, the old Holidays, and Reaganites. I even remembered I'd gone to high school with I think, the daughter of John Gavin, and I thought, you know, because I love Touch of Evil, and I think, isn't John Gavin. No, he's not in Touch of Evil. He's in Psycho, He's in all these movies.
And I thought about he was the ambassador to Mexico.
That's right, as is the Stacy Keach character in my play. And I thought about.
Your characters based on John Gavin.
To some extent. There are all these archetypes in At the back of all this, of course, there's also Joe Mantello, who you know, we're no longer a couple, but he's my family, my best friend, and you see s being a couple of what year two thousand and two.
So it was a while.
And he kept saying to me, with all possible respect, nobody's waiting for the next Robbie Bates play. And you know, these are chilling words because I have so much and it's not coming out.
My equivalent of that. As my agent said to me, he goes, it's not that these people don't want to hire you because they don't like you. He says, they don't want to hire you because they don't think of you at all.
Jesus. I thought, wow, well, it's terrible, because the worst thing that can happen to an artist, I'm invisible. I no longer matter for me. Writing plays has always been very tricky. I don't know a lot, I don't have a lot to say. I reach things very slowly, and I sometimes it seems facile and easy. And to me sometimes my thoughts and my sort of expressed opinions in plays seem hollow or naive even why because I know they're deeper truths always to be found and that I'm But.
Don't you think that seeking them and being aware of that makes you more likely to find it than anybody else? You didn't go to college, did you know why you wind up educating yourself?
I wish I'd gone to college. It was a depressed and unsettled kid. And why I don't. I think I wasn't at peace with probably any element of who I was, whether it was a sort of nascent intellectual or sort of pre expressive homosexual kid. Or you grew up where variously La.
You were born in La and you live there to your how old seven?
Then Brazil for three years in Rio, and then South Africa for six and a half years till I was eighteen, and.
Your father was in the condensed milk business.
My father worked for a giant multinational carnation milk. Yeah, it was a condensed milk business.
Was so La, Brazil, South Africa and then back to La back and when you finally get back to LA. How old are you?
Eighteen? So high school's over? I just finished high school. I'd sort of lost time through all the travels high school in South Africa, like I couldn't get used to things like cricket and corporal punishment. You know, you'd get caned for like not doing well on a spelling test, literally caned. And I think I was so busy trying to be sly and charming that I forgot how to be me. That I think led me to rebel against learning itself. So I was sort of interested in the
few things. I was interested in literature history, but I wouldn't apply myself to anything except escape, and part of escape meant not going to college. I was really lonely, and I I kind of became a depressed kid.
And manifest itself off. You can say, I think I did you know you were gay?
Then yes, I definitely knew that. I knew that.
And to your depression. Did it make you feel more isolated?
Totally?
I mean because it so it wasn't proactive the gay community there in nineteen three talking about getting caned.
Yeah, well, I think my parents, who loved me very much, were distracted by their own terrors. There are certain families that are born in terror and live in.
Terror, conceived in terror. I need you to write a play for me. I want to be called conceived in terror. There we go ahead.
Well, no, I mean death of a Salesman is a family that lives in terror.
You were howveled when you arrived in Durban ten So you were the.
Eight years Yeah, I was there almost eight years.
Critical time, ten years old. So all of your real back half of your childhood, your teenage years especially, you are in Durban.
I guess I was seventeen or something when we left.
But you had finished the high school program.
No, no, I finished it in La You did where Beverly Hills High School?
What was that like? I?
You know, was the only kid I knew who rode their bike to school because everybody else's parents had given them a Fiat literally, yeah or something.
Who were your friends then? Who did you become friends with? Anyone?
Oh? Yeah? In fact, Jenny Livingston went on to make Paris's Burning Great documentary Tina Landau great theater director. Gina Gershaan my oldest friend from high school. We were in plays together in the drama department. So I became friends with and I say this with real respect and love with fellow freaks.
We're taking a break, so stay with us. How are you feeling about yourself and about life that last year in Beverly Hills.
I think I was scared to death still. I mean, it was just a new form of foreignness, but it had the patent of something very familiar to me. But you know, I remember being taken to a party really early on, and I had developed a kind of weird eye beforehand for art. I thought maybe I was going to be a painter or an art historian. And I walk into this house and there is a giant David
Hockney and next to it is a giant Mother. Well, I'm standing in front of this giant painting that's famous that I've looked at in books Thames and Hudson art books. While I was in Durban at the Art Library of the University. The world was just very real and different, and it was easier to have sex and it was easier to function.
Were you writing?
I guess I was sort of writing, Yeah, what were you writing? I was writing really bad short stories about alienated Paul Bowle's kids Adrift in foreign countries, which is basically to tell you that it's still what I'm doing. It just looks slightly the wallpaper's prettier.
Yeah, where were you living at that as? I was living.
On friend's sofas, like the parents of children I went to high school with.
I was.
I was just a freak, you know, And I was at odds with my family at the time, you know, and I had escaped and it was just a nightmare.
How do we get from there to fair Country? Gordon Davidson, you.
Know in Pinocchio where he falls in with actors. I'm walking around. I ran into this girl I knew from high school. She said, what are you doing? And I'm sort of looking for a job. I think I'm starving to death. I'm not sure, she said to me, And I should have known. She said, well, my father just fired me. He needs to he needs a new assistant. And I was like, well, what does he do and she said, oh, he's a film producer.
Who is the film producer?
This is great guy and he was he a working producer.
I'm only asking for a name to make so I thought.
My first day at the office, he says to me, whatever you do answer the phones, but never pick up the phone. And I was like, I don't even know what that means. And he said, you'll do fine. And he had a gang of cronies, all of whom had contempt for the studio system and had worked around the edges of it, or in it, had done well, fallen out of favor, usually had destroyed themselves through my favorite thing,
their own ambivalence. I found myself at home for the first time in my life with it when the nest of scorpions, Yes I did, I found myself. I said this, I know, yeah, because nobody is trying to pass. Yeah, it's a den of thieves. We're hitting the law here. It was still the days of speaker phone. They would have fights. They had a tower on Sunset Boulevard. They had a nest of rooms in a tower, and they would be fighting with each other and then they would
suddenly be a pause. Someone would say, geez, if you could see what I see right now, that girl walking down Sunset she is so beautiful. The fight was over. Yeah, nothing meant anything. Cotic of sex, that's right. One of the masks for a glass of water is. In my first few weeks there nineteen eighty two. What do I know. I would go to the sink, bring a glass of water, spit it out like practically on me, and say this isn't water, and I would sug Yes, it's water. What
are you talking about? That's water. I want professional water. And the whole time became about professional water.
How long did that last? Three? Four?
Like four some years? No?
No, but it got You were in the scorpions looking down at the women's asses for four years, and.
I would copy everything down. And so at the same time I started hanging around with these actors, there was a sort of an equally desperate contingent of avant gardist odd playwrights out there in La living on the fringes of everything. And so I lived between these two worlds, one of which was sort of drunk and druggy, and the other was insane megaltamia.
I can't say the word meglo maniacal.
Thank you, Megan, I'm here for maniacal.
You just think of the words and I'll say that, thank you. We're going to beat each other.
I know. It's like Bluetooth without the technology Bluetooth me go ahead. I had to come up with a play for one of these sort of workshop things that we would put together, and one of these playwrights said to me, so, what's your play and me bullshitting, which is something I just did. I said, yeah, it's called Mislansky Zelenski on the spot. I just came up with the names on those guys. Yeah, I said, yeah, it's called Mislanskisky.
He's just based it on the guys in the tower.
So it's just them talking and I put all my notes together and we did it, and.
It was the first one you wrote. Yeah, now you're on Broadway. The show's a big success. People have said wonderful things about the show. I worshiped Stacy. I mean, he is one of the great wild mustangs of all theater history. And in this piece, it is that Reagan crowd, it is that Bush crowd, it is that blue blood Republican crowd, the conservative crowd.
Stacey captures that good. I wrote the part for him.
You wrote the partment.
Oh yeah, I knew that there was nobody who could capture that better. Ever, we'd worked together before, he'd done Ten Unknowns at the Taper, and it was a revelation.
Because the character has to have a dignity as well. Yeah, Stacy rings in a guy. We sit there and go, I get it. I would have followed him. I wanted him around.
He's great and I love him so much. You know. He and Joe didn't know each other, and so they got on the phone before rehearsal and Stacy says to Joe, you know, I've worked with Robbie before. We worked together before, and I know him well. And do you know him if you worked with him? And how well do you know him? And Joe says, I kind of know him and when we lived together for twelve years. But that's Stacy.
He's like, oh damn. The great thing about Stacy is he brings centuries of actors honor onto that stage with him.
The honor of honoring fellow actors, the honor of listening, the privilege of being an actor, the privilege of being in the theater, not missing a single show in his seventies, the rituals of it, the privilege of working in the theater is the thing that has been of everything that's happened to me, just the great honor of being in the American theater in some capacity is what I'm left with. That it's a privilege to be in it. I'm lucky
to have found my way back to it. What's institutionalized in working in the theater is a hunt for truth totally. It doesn't exist in the movie business and the television business. No, do you know what you're doing next? Are you on to something now that you're writing? Who knows? I can't tell you. I just can't tell you're scribbling. Yeah, I'm supposed to be doing things. I'm a mess at all times.
John Robin Dates says he feels like more of a growth up as a flight. When he started out in la he was CouchSurfing at the homes of his friend's parents. Things are different.
Now I have a home, I grow stuff, I'm responsible to people.
I have a dog. I have a dog. He has three what's a dog's.
Name, Trip? Trip? Yeah, here's three legs. He's a great dog.
I'm Alec Baldwin. Here's the thing that's brought to you by iHeart Radio.