This is Alec Baldwin and you're listening to Here's the Thing from iHeart Radio My guest today is the artistic director of the renowned Public Theater in New York City. He is also a theater director and dramaturge who is responsible for bringing to life iconic productions such as Angels in America and the Tony Award winning musical Hamilton. Oscar Eustace has produced and directed countless productions across the United States and overseas, notably the twenty seventeen Shakespeare in the
Park production of Julius Caesar. Eustace is an advocate for making theater more accessible and is also a devoted professor of dramatic writing and arts at universities such as UCLA, Middleburg College and Brown University. Oscar Eustace is ironically a college dropout and graduated from high school when he was fifteen. I was struck by his independence at such a young age and curious if he would characterize his younger self as self.
Sufficient The friend in Minneapolis in Minneapolis, Yeah it actually. I was part of Minneapolis's last ditch attempt to avoid forced bussing in nineteen seventy two, they knew they had to desegregate, So they had a basically all black school, Central High School, in downtown Minneapolis, and they said to any white kid who were in outlying districts that if they would voluntarily bust themselves in, they had to have a B plus or better average that they could participate
in Magnet school and get out a year earlier. I had skipped a grade earlier in my academic career. So what they did was take about fifty white hippies, bust them into an all black school, and give them special privileges. It didn't work very well, so I got out at fifteen, but barely. I was actually in high school with Prince Are you kidding me? No? Was he fifteen? Going with you getting out of there? He was black, so yeah, I was. I was older than him, and he was
just the weird, smaller kid with the guitar. I just I can't claim that I recognized as genius.
Yeah, we didn't get it done. But when you say fifty hippie kids, you're in what year? Is this the U fifteen? So when you're fifteen, when you're seventy two?
No, actually seventy three is when I graduated that was when I was fifteen or fifteen. But what was that environment like back then?
Was it that nurturing of alternative kind of educational patterns and things like that?
Was My high school experience was particularly rough, and I wouldn't trade it for anything now, because I went in there with a trajectory that was probably going to land to me in the academy of perhaps in profession, and I came out of there with a very different view of what life was like. And it's a view that although it horrified certain of my relatives, it's turned out very very well for me.
Now, your parents, you had a stepfather who based your correct stepfather and my biological mother, but also after he sobbed up my biological father and my stepmother.
So I have four parents. How old were you when they got divorce? Your ten? You were ten? Yeah, but they stayed in that general community in the Minneapolis. Well, they actually went southern Minnesota, and when they remarried, everybody moved up to Minneapolis. So I moved to Minneapolis.
And when did you you and the crew head over to was the Netherlands? Where did you go?
Berlin? Well, I can't keep track of your travels. Yeah, no, no, what actually happened. As soon as my mother and stepfather had an empty nest, which was when I was fifteen, when I went to New York, they promptly decamped and moved to East Berlin, where they spent half of every year for the next fifteen odd years. They were on faculty at Humboldt University, both of them. Yeah, they were committed communists, and so I for the next fifteen years.
I moved to Zurich for a couple of years in the late seventies to work at the Shaushpiel House there. But I went and visited them right here. The what house It's called the Schaushpiel House Zurich, and at that time it was the largest theater in the whole German speaking world, had about eighty actors full time year round on and Yeah, to do what founded a experimental second stage called us labor the laboratory which still exists. Howl.
Then at nineteen you say it still exists. To the program with Trinity and Brown still exist the insity, So they all lived on so far, right, the public still open too, Right, I haven't killed it yet, I have not yet. We're trying to keep we're trying to keep everything alive. The secondary was in Zurich, but I traveled throughout the German speaking world a lot, and of course took advantage of my parents being in the East to spend a lot of time there as well as in
the West. And the that you tour London and Edinburgh when you were fourteen, Yeah, I went around a lot. My parents accepted my independence with a very good grace fought for They didn't encourage you were both. They never took legal action to prevent me from what I wanted.
They occasionally disapproved of how wildly I was traveling and how much I wasn't pursuing my education, but I think they fundamentally trusted me, which they were right to do, and although they were worried about why were they right
to do that? Well, because you made the most of them, I exactly I did not waste my life, and I'm happy to say that by the time I was about thirty, all of my parents recognized that fully and embraced what I had made out of my life, and so for the last thirty five years or so I had full par mental support. Most of them are dead now, afraid, but I was lucky enough to watch my mother glory in what I had done with my life, which is a feeling I cherish.
When do you come back to the United States after the Zurich I moved back.
Full time in nineteen eighty one twenty two, and I moved back to San Francisco. Actually, and you were involved in the theater out there for quite a while. Oh yeah, And I say, San Francisco is where I grew up. That's where I spent my twenty days.
You at the Yureka Theater for quite a while, ten years and ten years, ten years.
Why where became well, you know when there was a not for profit theater. Oh yeah, tiny out for profit theater in ninety nine seats. It's where I became the artist that I've tried to become. Where I became the person that I've tried to way two ways, very specifically. I had been a committed experimental theater guy. I didn't believe that the playwright had any place in the theater anymore. When I'd come to New York, I'd lived downtown in Soho.
I never went above fourteenth Street. I was fully immersed in the experimental theater scene, and at that point in the seventies, you may remember, the counterculture didn't distinguish between politically radical and esthetically radical, and it was all sort of messivecounterculture, and I moved sort of freely in that.
But about nineteen eighty, after a couple of years of living in Europe, I began to recognize that there was a dichotomy between my politics, which were quite left, and the work I was doing, and that the work I was doing was appealing only to a tiny fraction of international art audience that I didn't want to talk to.
I didn't really have anything to say to them. And I had a real crisis of conscience, you know, Christmas of nineteen eighty weeping in Zurich, listening to Patty Smith's Easter album and realizing that I had to come back to the United States, I had to try to speak to Americans and not be an expat, and that I had to try to make my work reflect the content of my politics, which both meant that it had to
carry ideas in a different way. And I had to speak to an audience that I had something to say to. And that is what impelled me to San Francisco, impelled me into the Eureka Theater, where for the first time I'd ripped up my passport to the avant garde, as I say, and for the first semester to do with plays, because I recognized that you needed playwrights to do what I wanted to do, both in terms of.
The opposite of what you were doing in that exactly in the seventies, exactly in the Mama.
And I have not regretted it for a moment. It was the big shift of my life.
I remember coming here, and I always say to people in terms of actors' careers, when I came to New York, Glenn Close, Sigourney Weaver, Kevin Klein, Bill hurt Raoul, Julia Cazal, all of them was like merrill. Of course, you made your bones in the theater. You flow out to LA to get a paycheck, and movies were like some fantasy land where you just went out there and if they hired you, great, that's exciting.
I'll take the money. It's fun.
But I come right back here to do something else. I told Sam Waterston, I said, every fucking guy I knew in New York.
Had that Hamlet poster on the wall of their apartment and now I have it on my wall right now.
When I read this about you, I to see this guy. Independence is the key. This is what I want to do now. Now it seems like there's a shelf life.
Do anything you do. I mean, then you go from San Francisco to La Music Center and then to wrote Istan and the Engineer. In a way that's right now. But something happened to me when I was a teenager and first running away to Soho which is there was and is a great experimental theater called Mabo Minds, which at that time I was a groupie of Lee Brewer and Joanne Accliis. I followed them around the country. I love them, and they were in residence at this theater
i'd never heard of, called the Public Theater. And I walked into the Public Theater as a Moble Minds groupie. But I was sixteen years old, and I got imprinted like one of Conrad Lorenzo's little baby ducks, who you know, think the first big moving object they see as their parent. And the Public Theater imprinted me with the idea of what a theater should be. And it didn't really blossom
in me till seven or eight years later. But when it did, I feel like I spent the rest of my career going around the country trying to recreate the public theater until I finally got a chance to come back here and run the mothership itself. This has always been my dream job. This has always been my idea, not almost, but since then it's my idea of what
a great theater should be. So in that way, I feel like I've been incredibly consistent and not all that independent, faithful to an idea that existed before I was around.
Now we're going to get into the public for quite a bit later in a minute, but I'll just hopscotch too. Well, first of all, I want to ask you the difference route in San Francisco and LA in terms of theater audience.
Well, in San Francisco it was a cocoon. It was a little blue bubble for me, which is why it was the perfect place to grow. Because I at Theoreka I was in San Francisco. You know, I'd been so in the margins everywhere I had been been San Francisco. You know, I got to know city government officials and they treated me like an adult. I you know, I met Harvey Milk I got to know his success or the first the work you were doing was important exactly, and this crazy red diaper baby hippie kid was sort
of mainstream, you know. I wasn't marginalized there. So it gave me this again blue bubble within which to grow up and develop my work and become a man. And I will always love San Francisco for that. But then came the time when I needed to start to try to have an impact beyond the blue bubble. And the actual specific thing that took me to La is when a play that I'd been working on for three years was too big for the Erika Theater, and that was Angela.
You were working with him, I was working with them. Oh my god, I produced Tony. How did you meet him? Well, no, I'm when I was at Eureka. But I was here in New York and I missed a curtain at the public theater of a Lenn Jenkin play and I was furious because I was poor and my trips to New York were few and far between, and I couldn't waste a night. And my friend said, Hey, I've been telling you about this NYU kid, who I think is so tacited and exactly, and he's got a stage reading going on.
This said eight thirty, let's go see that up in Chelsea. I was like, oh yeah, christ, I'm going to waste an evening on an NYT read through. Oh so I go up and it was a bright room called Day And within twenty minutes I had one of those moments you dream of, which is I knew not only was I in the presence of a great writer, I was in the presence of somebody who cared about all the things I cared about. I didn't think there was anybody else in the American theater who cared about those things.
And the first act of My Room ended at that time with the acts on stage singing the International Communist him the International Ally. And later I heard the backstage and intermission the actors turned to Tony and said, who the fuck is singing along in the audience? And that was me. Sony and I met that night within a few never knew him, never knew him. That was that's where we met. I became and he was in NYU at the times, generally in the directing program, and he'd
started writing plays so he'd have something to direct. Then we will let him direct it. He had to write him to direct it. And you know now about a year later, a year and a half later, I did his first professional production. I directed that play Broakroom called a and by that point I commissioned Angels. We'd become the very very close friends.
Were commissioned through Mark Tables, through the Eureka, through Eureka, and we worked on in San Francisco until it became clear that this play was getting too big and the Eureka would never be able.
To afford it. So Gordon Davidson, who was artistic director of the Market perform offered me a job and I sent him the first two acts of Angels and I said, this is nineteen eighty nine, and I said, Gordon, the Berlin Wall is down, Communism is dead. My girlfriend has left me. I think my theater company is falling apart. I don't know what I believe in, but I believe in this play. If you'll agree to produce it, I'll
come work for you. And to Gordon's immense credit, the next day he called me up and said, this is genius. Of course I'll produce it. And I moved to la and worked for Gordon He's the only man I've ever called boss. I worked from for five years and we did Angels there nineteen ninety two.
I'm going to the final performance of the final weekends of Angels in America at the Forum. Oh and you had to walk through a gauntlet of gay men with signs that said, I have aids, will you sell me your ticket? Oh my god. They thought they would die and never see the show because they had no been announced. As I recall, that wasn't as wired into the theatrical world as I was. But but I had not been
announced that was going to go to Broadway. So I'm going there, going walking through this gartland of like a dozen men to go. And it was also the time when there was like the one decent restaurant downtown where every movie star that went to go see Angels. That was the last weekend. You can see both parts, that's right, and in the after and in the evening the same day they both sections of Perastroika and Millennium first, so
we see Millennium, then we see Pastrica. And he went to this restaurant was Jody Foster and the Shell final It's like it's like the Commissary at Warner Brothers.
It was every single it was unbelievable, packed with movie stars and we were kids and this just was you know, it was just unbelieved.
Saw that last weekend that the show was there when you know, obviously the public has a legacy where they printed a lot of money on the Courseline course line is something that's developed there and they cash in.
I know that to Hamilton. I'm not quite sure they had the same deal as they had not exactly the same deal, but good Enough has given us a lot of support. Yeah, yeah, question, that's great.
And my question is when someone wants to do a play, how do you decide what plays you're going to do? Do people pitch you like a movie studio you developed all yourself in house?
Well, overwhelmingly, we don't pick plays. We are in relationships to writers, and sometimes those relationships are at the very beginning of a writer's career. For instance, we're going to be producing this brilliant play next fall called Initiative by a writer named else Went who this is going to be her first professional production. She's been with us in the Emerging Writers Group for a couple of years. We've gotten to know her I think she is absolutely remarkable.
She's never had a production before. It's going to be great. On the other hand, we're also producing this spring Carol Churchill, who is in her mid eighties and we've been producing her for forty five years. We produce Serious Money with You, Joe Joe Force feeding the Broadway world. I was an opening night watching you in Serious Money. I went out with my friend two I think with Joe Allen's and I sat there and I said, I have just seen
what I want my life to be. I want to take a radical play, develop it at my theater, the Serious Money I had been at the Royal Court in London, then move it to the public theater and then move it to Broadway. That's my dream for my life.
Theater director Oscar Eustace. If you enjoy conversations about theater and the performing arts, check out my interview with internationally acclaimed conductor Pavel Yrvey.
I have two girls right now who they're very talented, but they don't know what am I going to do in life. I never had ever that question because I wanted to not only to be a musician, I wanted to be a conductor. Why because my father was a conductor.
I loved my father.
I think he was having a lot of fun, and we're very close to this day, so it was a done deal. I wanted to be a conductor and I never ever wanted to be anything else.
Ever.
To hear more of my conversation with Pavo YERVI go to Here's the Thing dot org. After the break, Oscar Eustace talks about the struggles facing the public theater when he first started as artistic director in two thousand and five. I'm Alec Baldwin and this is Here's the Thing. Oscar Eustace's career could have taken a more commercial path, but he has always stayed true to the nonprofit world. I was curious about this choice and whether Eustace found he had more creative freedom in that space.
Well, I think it's actually very simple, which is, you know, you talk about my independence, and it's certainly true that all four of my parents had doctorates, and all of them, at various points were tenured professors at universities, and I never went to college. So there's a certain amount of rebellion there. But there's another part that isn't a rebellion
at all, because I went into the nonprofit theater. I actually took my family's values and applied them to a field that was not the same as their field, but was within a handshake distance. Because the values of the nonprofit theater are not that different from the values that my family spent their lives pursuing, and not only the
values of the academy, but their political values. And what I felt comfortable in the nonprofit world because in the nonprofit world, in a way, what you're always asking yourself or trying to find the right answer, is how can I be most of service? What can I do that will help the most? And that's help your society, help your audience, help your city, help the artists you're working with, help the instant And that is so much easier for me to do than to think about how do I
help myself? How do I get ahead? I just can't think that wasn't raised that way. And you know, many years ago, my friend Burke Walker gave me that question. He said, ask yourself, where can you be of the most use? And what I loved about that was it allowed me to think about my career without being a careerist.
So that question has just guided me and when I spent my five years in LA and I moved there when I was thirty, and you know, among other things, I thought, okay, well film television or in LA and I'll see if I want to do that. Five years in La, I couldn't motivate myself to walk across the room associate artistic director of the taper I could have met. I just had no interest. And after five years there, I just sort of looked at my own actions and well,
I guess I'm a theater rat. Better move back to these ghosts. And so I did, because it's funny you use that phase.
Because we were talking in our prep and I said, this guy's the theater rat.
Absolutely theater rats.
But the payton sets, making costumes, handling the parking whatever. Very few of them get to be the head guy at the public theater. Now you're at Trinity, you're only academic or the full time is it? Was it your only academic appointment?
Well, Trinity is a Trinity rep. Theater is. Simultaneously, they gave me a courtesy appointment at Brown, which I did not treat as a courtesy. I treated it as a full time job. And I'm very happy to say that in my last three years there, I was able to form a consortium between the Theater and Brown for graduate training that offered MFAs and PhDs. And it still exists, and I'm incredibly proud of.
What do you think about people going to degree granting expensive degree granting universities for acting degrees?
What do you think about that? I am very happy to say that the Brown program went tuition free a number of years ago, and so people graduate with no debt whatsoever. It's a crime to saddle young artists with enormous debt coming out of school. It makes no sense.
Well, the issue from me, I taught a semester, a real semester with a teaching partner, one of their staff, and did this with me in twenty thirteen. So I'm going to do Thursday afternoon for like three hours, one to four or whatever it was with my teaching fellow. And I remember leaving there and we did a little postmarting, which you could tell they were kind of wiggling in
their seats. They didn't really want to hear what I had to say, which was I said, you need to have somebody you throw in here as like, you know, the you know the seat we have for Elijah at the meal, I said, because you need somebody who forget the cube to a degree. They can't be below a three to zero, they can't be low a certain set. But let them in as a completely skill based audition. The other kids need to see what good acting is.
Because a lot of the people that showed up for my class, they were smart kids, the cubes, they had the SATs, they had everything. They just weren't that talented and they were willing to pull their pants down to take a chance. So you've got a lot of bright kids, but I'm not what you're Any of them were going to be actors and you're giving this this very expensive education. So I said, let some people in, like three or four of them. You know, gender, race, everything mixed in.
Make all those considerations as you need to, but I said, let them come in. The other kids going to see it as a model. And they just looked at me and said thank you. You know, they walked up. The college educations help people become an actor, which make them better than they already are.
Listen, I really good masters programs. Graduate programs are worth their weight in gold. You learn things at the graduate level at NYU, at Yale, at Juilliard, at Brown, any of the really good programs that you can't learn anywhere. So there's a certain set of skills, particularly in terms of verse speaking and working with you and smooth you're I can learn anywhere else undergraduate. I don't think you
need professional training in the same way. What I really think young actors, young artists in general should be doing is learning as much about the world as they can, because the last thing the theater needs is more uneducated people. We have way too many people in the theater who don't know about anything except the theater, and that's not
what any art form needs. We need people who are genuinely doesn't matter to me if they go to the university, but they have to genuinely be curious, ravenously curious about how the world works, who wags it, who runs it, who suffers in it, How does this work your place? What's your place in it? And how can that place change not just for you but for other people. And that broad education, whether again it's you're an autodi dictor you went to the university, I think it is terribly
important for young people. You got to have something to bring to the theater. Not just yourself hoping to be a star, but you got to make yourself into a person.
Well, when I was in I had a job on a daytime TV show. I was in the infancy. They gave me one show a week. The more they thought your character was working in the storyline and popular with the audience and the other cast members, the more they gave you. But when I'm working one day a week, I went down and did a showcase theater at the old Van Damn Theater the town of Seventh Avenue. I
did student films, corkboard at the film school. The Index card wanted twenty two year old bartender, you know, wacky comedy.
And I say to people, you guys got to keep putting it out there. To stay home and just do readings.
I have a lot of friends about they stay home and they just read plays, and I'm like, no, go out there and just take any job.
You can get any job. You know. The other thing that I say is I've hired many, many thousands of people in my life at this point, and I have never hired anybody because they can do a lot of different things. They can do everything. Oh he could convincingly be anything. I hire everybody because they're a specific thing, because I get a sense that they're a person that I want, whether it's a playwright, a director, an actor. You have to become yourself because yourself is ultimately what
gets hired in the theater. And that doesn't mean you become narrow or specialized. It means you become fully who you are. And by being fully who you are, you become somebody that other people are interested in working with, and who's interested in working with, somebody who's Bland's somebody who could you know, sort of could fade into the woodwork you're interested in. They're not very anything, yeah, exactly. You know. It's why like in movies or television you'll
have writers' rooms. In the theater, you have a writer because we're interested in individual voices. We're not interested in something that sounds like it was written by a room full of people. And that individual specificity of self is one of the things I love the theater so much.
Now, when you leave Trinity and you come to the big town here in two thousand and five, yeah, you come here, and what's the financial condition of the place, Because that's I'm always looking at everybody ampon this film festival, everybody I worked with, what's the financial condition of what they're inheriting?
Well, you know, it wasn't great. The public had been through a really sort of calamitous reduction in the early two thousands. After nine to eleven, we were stable, but we were down to about a twelve million dollar a year operation. We were having to scrape to get two shows in the park every summer, and we had very little money to produce downtown. As a matter of facturer spaces were empty a lot. And when I arrived, this was a signed to me of what trouble we were in.
There was a faction of the board who thought we should start charging for free Shakespeare in the park, and that was the way out of our alma And I'm very glad to say we turned that around pretty quickly. Why doesn't the public have a Broadway House? Because oh yeah, because if we had a Broadway House, then we'd have to be programming for a Broadway House. And I have no desire to change how we program what has worked
much better for us. And I have to say I put our track record against any other theater in the country or the world is we make shows downtown, and we make them in an environment where we have no commercial pressures. We have three hundred seats in our largest theater. If I do anything well, it'll sell out. You know, it's just I mean literally, there's no economic pressure downtown. But what there is is the pressure to let each
show become the best version of itself. And you know what, that turns out to be a pretty great way of unleashing the commercial potential of shows. So fun Home, a show about a lesbian cartoonist whose gay dad commits suicide, turns into this extraordinarily beautiful show. We opened it in our ninety nine Sea theater, we move it to our biggest theater, we move it to Broadwood based one is which one? Now? The Newman three? How much is the Lewester?
The rest of one hundred and seventy five? That's right? Didcottish play? Yeah? Yeah, that's right. It's a great It's a great poster too. But Funhoe ends up winning the Tony Ward for Best Play, Hamilton. I mean, you name it. These unlikely shows can take on a life downtown because
you're not trying to make them commercial. You're trying to let them become themselves, and you know what, people actually want to see shows that are not cookie cutter, that are not like last year's here, They're not based on a movie title. It tends it to be a better way of making commercial successes than aiming for commercial success. That's funny you said that about the description you had the character. Remember saying to George back in ninety eight
when we did the passage. You know, the emblem of the public theater is like a you know, a black transgender woman in a wheelchair who's eighty years old is like the lead character, and will assume we get like that sounds really good to me. It sounds great to me, you know, like don't don't, don't bring your shit into my theater. You know.
I mean, like, we we do whatever, we do what we deal as a great storytelling. But the public does have an emblem. The public has a hood ornament of all this diversity and all this eclusivity. And is it tough to maintain that? What a material that is the dna U crave in that area. That's that's really open minded that way, but it's just not very good, That's what I'm saying.
Great submissions, Well, no, No, it's not that. It's scroll back to what I said. It's relationships. We don't wait for material to come to us. We form relationships. I'll give you a beautiful example this. When I arrived at the theater. One of the things I says is, Okay, we get a thousand plus submissions a year from players. We've got this great. So who's not getting to us?
And we said, okay, folks who don't have an agent, who didn't go to an MFA program, who I've never had a New York production, and who actually have to work for a living, so they have a hard time, you know, joining writers' groups or you know sometimes even going to the graduate problems at universities. So let's form a group that's just those people that people without MFAs, without agents, without productions, and you're just to make it easy, will pay them to be in this group rather than
charge them. So we formed the Emerging Writers Group, which was is now eighteen nineteen years old and has been extraordinarily successful. Brandon Jacob Jenkins came out of that group. Dominique morrisso Mona Mansour, I could keep going and going else went to I just mentioned that we're premiary next year.
Came out of that group. And when you start working with writers that early in their careers, when we start supporting them, the work comes, and not just out of the EWG group, but just you form the relationships you can. There is no problem with our work being incredible diverse. There's no I'm of really high quality work being incredibly diverse. You just have to go out and develop the relationships with the artists who make that work.
In the way that I mentioned that canon of those actors who were the theater was something that they just needed to come back to in order to play the parts.
And that this is something Julie Ard wherever they went Yale, highly trained and highly skilled, and you know the most famous actors, many of them went on to become stars obviously in that way. Isn't like that now?
Do you think the generations of actors now who are succeeding in film and television feel the poll to come back to the not for profit thee I'm not talking about Broadway.
They might get a paycheck. Let me put it this way, there are a lot of great actors who do. But it's not a coincidence that I'm now on faculty at NYU, and I teach in their graduate acting program every year, and I'm happy to say some of those actors end up on our stages. We need to keep making that pipeline solid because right now the commercial industries film television
are plucking our talent while they're still in school. They are plucking them right at the beginning of our careers, whether it's play rights or actors, and pulling them right into a digital life. And if an actor doesn't get a chance, they may be really well trained, but if they don't get a chance to do Shakespeare professionally at least a few times early in their career, it gets very hard to come back and do it again later. You've got to have that feel of it when you're
a young person, you're just finished your training. You go it, you do Shakespeare in the park, a couple of you, understudy a lead, you play a supporting character. Then maybe ten years later you can come back and do it again. But if you don't get that grounding right at the end of it's hard. Same with writers young play rights. If they get pulled into TV writers' rooms the second they graduate, they don't have the muscle of writing the plays. And if you don't get that muscle when you're young,
it's harder to develop in your orders. So a lot of what and when I say I, I really mean the whole field is trying to do is make sure that young people know not that they're going to spend their whole life monks in the theater. The world works the way it works, and people are going to work in film and television, and should be able to work in film and television, but you got to also have a home in the theater. You got to know that
that's a place you can return to. And so you take a writer like Susan Lauri Parks, who we've given her a salary for the last fifteen years. She's got a salary and healthcare and benefits, and you know what her duties are to right place, not even the right place for us, just the right place. And it was sort of an experiment what happens to a master writer in her early fifties when you actually give her a chair at the theater, give that relationship with a handful
of people. Soon as the when we have that food issue that we're working to get more happened since she keeps turning out great plays and Dog Underdog my favorite. Yeah right, but you know, Father comes Home from the Wars. It's fantastic that the Plaquear place that she just did Sally and Tom, or her play about Sally Havings and Tom Jefferson just a year and a half ago, was wonderful. And that's not been the norm. American players don't keep
producing great work into their fifties and sixties. But that's because the theater hasn't made a home for them, and we need to do that. We need to make sure that we've got a place for writers not only at the beginning of their careers, but as they reach seniority to keep coming back to theater.
Director Oscar Eustace, if you're enjoying this conversation, tell a friend and be sure to follow Here's the thing on the iHeartRadio apps, Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts. When we come back, Oscar used to shares why he is passionate about uplifting new voices in playwriting. I'm Alec Baldwin and this is here's the thing. The Public Theater was founded by Joseph Papp in nineteen fifty four and
originated as a Shakespeare workshop. Since then, the public theater continues its tradition of staging productions like they are free Shakespeare in the Park at the Delacorte Theater in Central Park. I was curious as to whether or not there was a requirement for Oscar Eustace to fill a quota of Shakespeare productions per year, and how he upheld this tradition.
Heck, now, now, now, are there some years you don't do any or do you always rot say? Oh no, no, no, we always have tigiation. And here's when I say have to, I mean for mission purposes. And there's two reasons. One is he is the greatest playwright who ever wrought an English language. So he's a stunning role model for every other playwright we do. You see, this is what play roight at its greatest can be, and aspire to be
that big, aspire to combine what Shakespeare reminds. But it's also true that in addition to being the greatest writer and the history of the planet, the English speaking peoples conquered the world and as a result, their greatest writer, Shakespeare, has become the entry point into the world's culture. Now that's a fact which you can abhor or applaud, but
it is a fact. And if that's going to be the entry point into the world's culture, it's our job to make sure that he belongs to everybody, that everybody has access to him, not just the educated, not just the elite, not just the moneyed people, not just the European people, not just the people of European ancestry. But
everybody gets to own him. And that's part of why we're committed to producing Shakespeare over and over, to make sure that he belongs to people of all classes and raises and ethnicities in New York City, and that to me, is a huge pillar of how we democratize our culture.
Perhaps you're familiar with my friend Dan Wexler, who's an antiquarian book You know Dan dan Wexler, who's an antiquarian book dealer. I'll say this from my listeners. And I met Dan who he and his partner with this antiquarian book company. They came upon a book that they recognized and was probably undervalued and not a very significant number of thousands of dollars. They bought his copy of Barrett's Alvieri.
You're familiar with Barrett's Salvieri. So this book, which was a writing book of writing, a book of writing instruction or whatever. But they get it, and over the course of a couple of years they're showing it around the world and no one will say they say, I think it is what you think it is.
It's Shakespeare's copy of Barrett's Aalvieri.
And everybody around the world, Folgers, Oxford, all over the world. They go get someone else to say it is, and I'll concur it. I'm not gonna say it is. Stick my neck because if I'm wrong right then, and and they think they got his copy notes in there, I think you can imagine.
Well, just to say, you know that, that leads my mind to the whole Shakespeare controversy, that there's this you know strain, which I'm sure many of your listeners have heard of people who for the last two hundred or so years have been claiming that Shakespeare didn't write the plays that somebody else did. That is entirely a class based argument, and starting the early nineteenth century, a wealthy
englishwoman was the first to start it. Couldn't believe that the greatest writer in the history of the English language was a working class kid, a Tanner's son who only had a seventh grade education, and so because of that, decided that maybe Sir Francis Drake actually wrote the works. And you'll find in all of the you know, the Earl of Oxford, all of these theories, it's desperately trying
to prove that it was the nobility. It was the massively educated person who wrote Shakespeare, not a Canner son with the seventh grade education. And so it's why I don't just disagree with the authorship controversy. I despise it because it's an attempt to re establish the very kind of class distinctions that we're devoted to tearing down.
If people want to submit to people submit plays to you, Yeah they do, and I mean you must be you must have a lot of submissions.
Yeah we will. Well, we we ask people to send a synopsis and a sample because we simply don't have the manpower person two to read everything your movie. So you know, if we are intrigued, we then request the full script. Have you found any pieces you like that you've done for that, I'm over the transom as we call it. I'm not sure. We certainly have found people
that we've developed relationships with that. We've then produced pieces, but it's very rare that we'll actually get a script and go, oh my gosh, we've got to produce this play that happens once in a blow mown. It did happen a few years ago with a wonderful writer named Sarah Burgess who is still just adore. She wrote a play called dry Powder about Wall Street, and I read it and I just said, we've got to do this,
and we did. Tommy Klee directed it in Hanka's area, and John Krasinski and Claire Danes were and Sanja de Silva was a fantastic cast, amazing, And you know, she turned out to have just studied Wall Street. She didn't. I mean I read like it was written by an insider. So every once in a while you'll get these just missiles that shoot across the sky and you pull it out and there it is. But people respond to both
of the plane. Oh here was going on? Yes, Sarah now has more work than she knows what to do with. And Sarah, come back to the theater. We're waiting for you. What are you working on now? Well, what's coming up this summer? You can't say you don't know. No, No, actually, I can tell you we have This summer. Was especially excited because we're reopening the Delacorte. We have spent two
years remodeling it. It is going to be absolutely gorgeous, unbelievably accessible, much safer and drier, and friendly to raccoons without necessarily inviting them backstage on stage. On stage, they they are going to do what they want, but we need them to not be backstage grisly. So we're going to reopen with the production of Twelfth Night that Sahim Ali, my associate logistics director, is directing. I couldn't be more
excited about it. We've got a great cast of public theater veterans, the petere Nango, Sandra Oh, Jesse Tyner, Ferguson, Peter Dinkledge, Daphney Rubin Vega. I mean, it's an embarrassed bill camp of riches. It's just Elizabeth Day. Yeah, so you're going to do that Shakespeare and then one TBD. No, we're actually only doing one because we were worried about construction getting behind. So one the going to start performing in the first week of August, and then next summer,
the summer of twenty six two shows. Yeah, we'll do the full nine yards, and then we've got a spring season coming up which is full of shows that I love. There's a beautiful show called Sumo which we're doing as a coproduction of my E Theater, which is about sumo wrestling, Japanese wrestling, and it's both a fascinating introduction to the world of sumo and a sort of deep exploration of Japanese culture and perhaps the most insightful play about masculinity
that I've ever seen. It's going to be just displayful. Yeah, it's really well.
I just want to say the most exciting and interesting here lies love. I want all, I want it odd, I want it different that I want something I can't see you know where.
And I love to hear lies love. I love everything. When I come there, when I have the time, you can't leave, you know that, right, Well, I'm not going to leave for a while. I don't leave for a while for a while, and make sure the theaters in very good hands when I do.
My thanks to the Public Theater's artistic director, Oscar Eustace. 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 Danielle Gingrich. I'm Alec Baldwin. Here's the thing is brought to you by iHeart Radio