Speaker 1: This is Alec Baldwin and you're listening to Here's the
Speaker 1: Thing from iHeart Radio.
Speaker 2: Whatever it is, whatever you do, You're our daughter and
Speaker 2: I will love you.
Speaker 1: John Robin Bates has a new play on Broadway, recently
Speaker 1: nominated for a Tony. Other Desert Cities is about family
Speaker 1: dysfunction and the choices we make.
Speaker 3: There are consequences to our actions. What does that mean?
Speaker 3: How could I trust you? How could I ever be
Speaker 3: in your presence?
Speaker 1: My dear Robbie, as he's known to many, pursued similar
Speaker 1: themes in the drama he created an executive produced for
Speaker 1: ABC Brothers and Sisters. Robbie's strengths as a playwright magnified
Speaker 1: by the talent he surrounds himself with. Dan Sullivan directed
Speaker 1: Substance of Fire in nineteen ninety two. Joe Mantello directed
Speaker 1: Other Desert Cities. Robbie Bates often writes for specific actors
Speaker 1: he admires, like Stacy Keach and Ron Rifkin, who have
Speaker 1: worked on several of Robbie's stage and screen projects. In
Speaker 1: the theater world, you'd be hard pressed to find someone
Speaker 1: who wouldn't want to work with Robbie. He comes across
Speaker 1: as kind, human and humble. During our conversation, he confessed
Speaker 1: there's been a dark side to his success on Broadway.
Speaker 1: He's been spoiled. John Robin Bates can barely think about
Speaker 1: going back to the smaller theaters.
Speaker 3: I'm ruined. I'm ruined from off Broadway. Now, I sort
Speaker 3: of say things like, well, that plays an off Broadway play,
Speaker 3: it's not a Broadway play. Making fun of myself. The
Speaker 3: difference is, you know, you're in this great, great, grand
Speaker 3: old house, you know that's built for a kind of
Speaker 3: big experience, and the drama is somehow expanded. I mean,
Speaker 3: I listen. I never knew the difference, so I was.
Speaker 1: Always and when you're there, you feel there's just a
Speaker 1: different tapestry there. When you're in a broad that lends
Speaker 1: itself to the kind of the import of the project.
Speaker 3: Or there's a lot of different things going on. You know,
Speaker 3: the audience has bought into an experience for which they've
Speaker 3: usually sadly paid more money, and so it changes the dynamic,
Speaker 3: it changes, there's more ornamentation around it in some way.
Speaker 3: The laughs change, which is odd. The laughs are sort
Speaker 3: of bigger and more expensive inside.
Speaker 1: So what was the arc of other desert cities before
Speaker 1: you went to Brovi.
Speaker 3: It began where in the Mitsi New House, which is
Speaker 3: the beautiful Jewel theater in the basement of Lincoln Center.
Speaker 1: How many seats ninety nine?
Speaker 3: I think small, small, intimate and in fact even claustrophobic.
Speaker 3: What happened was Joe Mantello, who directed it, immediately had
Speaker 3: a sense of having to build space around things, and
Speaker 3: that when once it moved in the transfer, I actually
Speaker 3: believe the play got better in its move It just
Speaker 3: all came together and some why I did a little
Speaker 3: work on the play, And.
Speaker 1: For example, what work did you do?
Speaker 3: I worked a little bit on the ending of the play,
Speaker 3: the last few minutes of the play.
Speaker 1: But it went so well off Broadway Lincoln Center. When
Speaker 1: you do that kind of thing, What is it that
Speaker 1: propels you to do that.
Speaker 3: It's just the knowledge that there's more to mind from it.
Speaker 3: And mostly it was, you know, Joe's great sort of
Speaker 3: probing sense of I think there's a deeper truth there.
Speaker 3: I think we've glossed over something or skipped over something.
Speaker 1: You have a success now on Broadway that if I
Speaker 1: could be mistaken, but it's been a while since you
Speaker 1: had it to this level. This is a substance of fire. Again.
Speaker 1: You know where you had great, great notices and people
Speaker 1: have said wonderful things about your career and your future.
Speaker 1: That was twenty years ago. I know when you look
Speaker 1: back on some of your players, would you change them?
Speaker 3: I can't. I just have to keep moving forward. I
Speaker 3: can't do it. I know that people do, but you
Speaker 3: know I can't fight old wars. I would find it
Speaker 3: disablingly backwards looking for myself to go back. I think
Speaker 3: some of my plays have been less successful to me
Speaker 3: than others. And to me, it's all been about the
Speaker 3: process of getting to the next play or getting to
Speaker 3: the next day. This play, though at the core of it,
Speaker 3: it comes out of trying to understand the ways in
Speaker 3: which people collapse, even though the subject is not necessarily depression.
Speaker 1: I want to take two plays substance of Fire. Sullivan
Speaker 1: directed and now You're on Broadway and had been at
Speaker 1: the Midsia with other Desert Cities, and Joe directed. Compare
Speaker 1: and contrast Sullivan with Joe in terms of the direct Yeah.
Speaker 3: They're very similar. Yeah, they are meticulous, meticulous miniaturists with big,
Speaker 3: expansive visions of what logic and a world are comprised of.
Speaker 3: They're both indefatigable. They never give up, they live and
Speaker 3: breathe it. Their approaches are very different. Dan has a
Speaker 3: kind of almost holistic view of the logic of a play,
Speaker 3: and Joe because I don't know, maybe because he was
Speaker 3: an actor for a long time. Even though Dan had
Speaker 3: been an actor, Joe looks for a different kind of
Speaker 3: character logic. He's always asking and what happens next. Dramaturgically,
Speaker 3: he's very much about the engine and the motor and
Speaker 3: Dan is, well, he's also actually, he's actually all there.
Speaker 3: If they're so similar that it's only a matter of
Speaker 3: their temperaments that are different.
Speaker 1: How are they different? Dan is like a priest.
Speaker 3: Yeah, he's more jesuitical.
Speaker 1: And then tell her was what to the extent that
Speaker 1: you want to say.
Speaker 3: He's passionately, passionately dedicated to leaving no stone unturned. And
Speaker 3: I think one of the reasons he went back to
Speaker 3: acting this last year did The Normal Heart on Broadway,
Speaker 3: and I think it's because he had to re experience
Speaker 3: the sort of dynamic of what it means to be
Speaker 3: an actor, to get under the skin of the experience
Speaker 3: and find out what kind of communicator he is with
Speaker 3: actors by acting again, Dan has a kind of remove
Speaker 3: about him, and Joe tends to delve, oh sort of
Speaker 3: with sword kind of play vistal play. Yeah, but they
Speaker 3: both have in common is real rigor about their work,
Speaker 3: ethic and their intellectual understanding of a subject of a world.
Speaker 1: Sometimes, although it's not always useful, I divide directors between
Speaker 1: directors that you want to please because you want them
Speaker 1: to like you, and directors that you want to please
Speaker 1: because you don't want them to hate you. And I
Speaker 1: don't think I need to tell you which one would
Speaker 1: be which in this case, you know, because Joe seems
Speaker 1: so intense. It just seems so smoldering all the time.
Speaker 3: Well he is he No, he wants you to show him.
Speaker 3: He doesn't want to have to tell you what to do.
Speaker 3: He wants you to bring something amazing to the table
Speaker 3: every day. It's why one loves, for instance, our mutual
Speaker 3: friend Nathan Nathan Lane, because every day he brings something new,
Speaker 3: what they call a money player.
Speaker 1: Many people, I think don't understand, and this is not
Speaker 1: always the case, that the theatrical experience movies are very, very different.
Speaker 1: When you work with a director in the theater. A
Speaker 1: lot of them don't tell you this or that they edit.
Speaker 4: You know.
Speaker 1: The most famous example who I love is Joey Tillinger
Speaker 1: who Tillinger basically says nothing for the three weeks, and
Speaker 1: then in the last week he selects my recollection of
Speaker 1: Joey was it was three weeks of me doing something.
Speaker 1: I'd say, what do you think? He can say, what
Speaker 1: do you think, Bavid? Do you think it was?
Speaker 3: I just I can't do it that way. I see
Speaker 3: it as all about stripping away and finding the kind
Speaker 3: of improvisitory freedom that's locked in the text, and that
Speaker 3: involves a combination of savviness and analysis and getting off
Speaker 3: book really fast and being able to move around really fast,
Speaker 3: and then setting.
Speaker 1: Joe I'm told is a stickler for that get off
Speaker 1: book well exact, because nothing really happens until you do.
Speaker 3: Yeah, it's difficult.
Speaker 1: Well, especially in a world now, where as I recall,
Speaker 1: you used to have five weeks a rehearsal for a
Speaker 1: straight play, we've gone to a four week rehearsal. Four
Speaker 1: weeks that goes by like you sneeze.
Speaker 3: I like shorter rehearsals with Bob falls. Another great director.
Speaker 3: I did three hotels this last summer at Williamstown with
Speaker 3: more Tyrney and Stephen Weber, and they had two and
Speaker 3: a half weeks Everything is Dangerous two and a half weeks.
Speaker 1: Tell me about when a play like Substance of Fire?
Speaker 1: How did that come to you?
Speaker 3: You know, it's interesting to sad that play and this
Speaker 3: play share something in common. They came out of despair.
Speaker 3: They both out of trying to write myself out of
Speaker 3: a kind of real sense of despondency and loss.
Speaker 1: And to the extent you want to talk about it,
Speaker 1: what was the despondency? Back in ninety one.
Speaker 3: I had been working on a play for a long
Speaker 3: time that was eventually became a play called A Fair Country,
Speaker 3: but at the time it was called Dutch Landscape. And
Speaker 3: I worked on an impossible play to do when you're young,
Speaker 3: about growing up. Did it at the Taper in Los Angeles,
Speaker 3: and I lost the play. I actually lost it, you know,
Speaker 3: in rehearsal and development through nobody's fault, you know, certainly
Speaker 3: not Gordon Davidson's who directed it. If anybody was at fault,
Speaker 3: if you can even use that word, because it's it's theater.
Speaker 1: It was me.
Speaker 3: I was just in despair over how did I let
Speaker 3: this happen to me? I used to work at book
Speaker 3: Soup in Hollywood, and I I urrowed the office above
Speaker 3: book Soup to try and figure out. You know, I
Speaker 3: was no longer working there. So I was sitting up
Speaker 3: in this office above the store, and I was surrounded
Speaker 3: by books, and I thought, oh, yeah, I've read all
Speaker 3: of you. I've read you uu u u u you,
Speaker 3: and none of you did me any good whatsoever. I
Speaker 3: don't know how to fight. First line of substance fiers.
Speaker 3: Look at all these books. The play is about learning
Speaker 3: how to fight and articulating the things you need, articulating
Speaker 3: the ways in which you have to express yourself in
Speaker 3: order to somehow achieve a kind of victory that goes
Speaker 3: beyond words.
Speaker 1: What's isaac victory?
Speaker 3: Isaac doesn't really have a victory in an odd kind
Speaker 3: of way. He goes down with his own ship, but
Speaker 3: he's unyielding. And I think I tried to learn how
Speaker 3: to be unyielding, and writing that play it didn't do
Speaker 3: me much good. Why well, because life is life and
Speaker 3: plays or plays, and you can't actually learn that much
Speaker 3: by writing them. You have to live.
Speaker 1: Do you find that in the ensuing years you wind
Speaker 1: up going up against things that just crush you so right,
Speaker 1: they crush you as you realize that. I'm not going
Speaker 1: to compare battles with television networks with going through the Holocaust.
Speaker 1: But on the other hand, the Isaac character, there are
Speaker 1: some people who they are just incapable of the happiness
Speaker 1: that leads to real intimacy because there's something that just
Speaker 1: cannot get over.
Speaker 3: I think it's very true, totally true of that character.
Speaker 3: And in his case, he has very little choice. He's
Speaker 3: locked in battle with this melancholia that won't lift.
Speaker 1: Which I think people don't have a real honest understanding about.
Speaker 1: They don't know what it's like to be betrayed on
Speaker 1: like the ninth level, you know, something really hideous.
Speaker 3: I think despair is the demension of one's despair are
Speaker 3: so difficult to quantify, so difficult to paint, so difficult
Speaker 3: to expose, and it's such a huge subject. Certainly, other
Speaker 3: desert cities is steeped in despair. You know, you say,
Speaker 3: talk about network battles, but I sort of, you know,
Speaker 3: was ejected from my one adventure in television up to
Speaker 3: that point, I was creating brothers and sisters, and it
Speaker 3: was a very unhappy, very difficult experience for me. And
Speaker 3: again at the end of that thing, I sort of
Speaker 3: I came back east, you know, after having been west.
Speaker 1: For a little bit. What was the first thing you
Speaker 1: wrote after that?
Speaker 3: There are three plays in my drawer because I had
Speaker 3: forgotten how to write that. This is the thing I
Speaker 3: think about with other desert cities is it's the play
Speaker 3: where I learned. I taught myself how to write again
Speaker 3: because I was so you to writing to please people.
Speaker 4: What happened with ABC, Well, first of all, networks being
Speaker 4: what they are, the people who commission the piece and
Speaker 4: are invested in putting it on the air end up leaving,
Speaker 4: and so you're left with a kind of in a
Speaker 4: kind of parents and not necessarily particularly.
Speaker 1: Caring support of step parents.
Speaker 3: Slightly bewildered. I mean, the guy who really ran the
Speaker 3: entertainment division kept saying, I don't understand why anybody watches
Speaker 3: this show, and I would say the same thing, except
Speaker 3: for different reasons. I mean, it was really it was bizarre.
Speaker 3: He would call me and scream at me. I actually
Speaker 3: said to him, I don't know who you think you're
Speaker 3: talking to and I would, you know, politely hang up
Speaker 3: and say I'm leaving the conversation now. At one point
Speaker 3: I said to them, don't you feel like there's something wrong?
Speaker 3: I mean, look at this amazing cast, Sally Field, Callista Flockhart,
Speaker 3: Rachel Griffith, Ron Rifkin, Patty Wedding, on and on and on.
Speaker 3: Don't you think there should be some higher intention, some integrity,
Speaker 3: maybe some I don't know, do you want do you
Speaker 3: want to try and get an Emmy or something. I
Speaker 3: didn't even know how to speak their language, but I
Speaker 3: thought Emmy would be something that they would recognize. And
Speaker 3: a literal quote from the head of the studio was, no,
Speaker 3: I don't need awards. The ratings are good enough for me.
Speaker 1: This happens in the first season, the first season. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and you are gone after how many seasons after the
Speaker 1: first season?
Speaker 4: Oh?
Speaker 1: Yeah, So all this takes place in one television season.
Speaker 1: He has one nine month period.
Speaker 3: Yes, you know, someone comes in to sort of manage
Speaker 3: the show, and they're beholden to the network in the
Speaker 3: studio as they should be. And I'm beholden to an
Speaker 3: aesthetic and I'm an idiot for being beholden to an aesthetic.
Speaker 3: But you know, people love the show. It went on
Speaker 3: for another four seasons after.
Speaker 1: That, and you maintained some participation in the show. You
Speaker 1: how was that possible? You created the show, You were
Speaker 1: the creator of the show. Correct.
Speaker 3: There was a writer's strike, and there was a force
Speaker 3: masure clause force masure being active. God, the studio network
Speaker 3: could use that clause to nullify any contract they had
Speaker 3: with anybody they liked. I had been very vocal during
Speaker 3: that strike about what I considered at the time the
Speaker 3: very unhealthy dynamic between the producers and the writer's guild.
Speaker 3: And I wrote about this way too much, was it?
Speaker 2: What was the name of those blogs you wrote on
Speaker 2: Huffington Post leaving La Yeah, a lot of them were
Speaker 2: very insanely painful and actually lead to again other deserts cities.
Speaker 3: The girl in the play can't stop writing about things
Speaker 3: that affected other people, and.
Speaker 1: She wants some truth.
Speaker 3: Yeah, and then she's left with the debris. So it
Speaker 3: all came out of you know, I pick up the
Speaker 3: phone one day and I see that, you know, people's
Speaker 3: deals are being canceled, but there are people who haven't
Speaker 3: made anything, And I suddenly I was gone, and I
Speaker 3: even before that, wasn't sure to what extent I was
Speaker 3: ever going to go back. I knew I would have
Speaker 3: some involvement, but then I had none whatsoever.
Speaker 1: And for me, what's curious, And again you don't have
Speaker 1: to answer this question. I'm just curious, which is, as
Speaker 1: the creator of a television show, there is typically a
Speaker 1: windfall for that person is the creative that show. If
Speaker 1: that was taken away from you, and through some contractual
Speaker 1: slide of hand, where did all that go? All went
Speaker 1: to the network? They took it all for themselves.
Speaker 3: I can't speak to that. I'm just not going to
Speaker 3: talk about them, but I am going to say that
Speaker 3: I think it was the best thing that ever happened
Speaker 3: to me, because it would have been dirty money, right.
Speaker 3: I think it would have destroyed me in some way.
Speaker 3: To have no pride in the thing that made me
Speaker 3: wealthy would have made me terribly uncomfortable, and I would
Speaker 3: have felt that I'd betrayed whatever promise or potential I'd
Speaker 3: set up for myself as a writer that if I
Speaker 3: was going to survive at it, it couldn't be compromised.
Speaker 1: This is Alec Baldwin, and I'm talking with playwright John
Speaker 1: Robin Bates more in a minute. We're taking a break.
Speaker 1: Stay with us. This is Alec Baldwin and you're listening
Speaker 1: to Here's the Thing. The idea for John Robin Bates's
Speaker 1: new play, Other Desert Cities came to him when he
Speaker 1: was back on the East Coast.
Speaker 3: I was sitting at a beach with my notebook, and
Speaker 3: I'm thinking about how to get back into it and
Speaker 3: what matters to me, and I just sort of self
Speaker 3: destructed at Brothers and Sisters. I had written about personal
Speaker 3: events that implicated other people in some way that I
Speaker 3: hadn't taken into account the consequences. And I found myself
Speaker 3: very much like the character in my play played by
Speaker 3: Beth Marvel and Rachel Griffith at various points, a writer
Speaker 3: who is a dangerous creature. And I had a note
Speaker 3: to myself play about daughter of a famous family who
Speaker 3: writes a book about her growing up in this family,
Speaker 3: something like that, the danger of telling the truth that
Speaker 3: turns out.
Speaker 1: To be a lie.
Speaker 3: And at that moment, this lady of a certain age
Speaker 3: walked by me, and she looked to me like Pat Buckley,
Speaker 3: the old doyenne of New York conservative politics, the wife
Speaker 3: of Bill Buckley. Bill Buckley, and I had lunch with
Speaker 3: her once and found her to be charming and engaged.
Speaker 3: And this woman walked by me on this beach with
Speaker 3: her hat and in a one piece bathing suit. I
Speaker 3: immediately felt the mother in that play, and I suddenly
Speaker 3: remembered old California the way it was when I was
Speaker 3: a kid, and we were just in the throes of
Speaker 3: an election at the time, too were about to be
Speaker 3: and the Republicans, certainly of that period and even more
Speaker 3: so today, were very confusing to me because they didn't
Speaker 3: seem recognizable to me as having a coherent, cohesive cog
Speaker 3: and argument for their principled positions, which had to be
Speaker 3: principled in some way. The play just came together in
Speaker 3: one fell swoop. California Conservatives, the old Holidays, and Reaganites.
Speaker 3: I even remembered I'd gone to high school with I think,
Speaker 3: the daughter of John Gavin, and I thought, you know,
Speaker 3: because I love Touch of Evil, and I think, isn't
Speaker 3: John Gavin. No, he's not in Touch of Evil. He's
Speaker 3: in Psycho, He's in all these movies.
Speaker 1: And I thought about he was the ambassador to Mexico.
Speaker 3: That's right, as is the Stacy Keach character in my play.
Speaker 3: And I thought about.
Speaker 1: Your characters based on John Gavin.
Speaker 3: To some extent. There are all these archetypes in At
Speaker 3: the back of all this, of course, there's also Joe Mantello,
Speaker 3: who you know, we're no longer a couple, but he's
Speaker 3: my family, my best friend, and you see s being
Speaker 3: a couple of what year two thousand and two.
Speaker 1: So it was a while.
Speaker 3: And he kept saying to me, with all possible respect,
Speaker 3: nobody's waiting for the next Robbie Bates play. And you know,
Speaker 3: these are chilling words because I have so much and
Speaker 3: it's not coming out.
Speaker 1: My equivalent of that. As my agent said to me,
Speaker 1: he goes, it's not that these people don't want to
Speaker 1: hire you because they don't like you. He says, they
Speaker 1: don't want to hire you because they don't think of
Speaker 1: you at all.
Speaker 3: Jesus. I thought, wow, well, it's terrible, because the worst
Speaker 3: thing that can happen to an artist, I'm invisible. I
Speaker 3: no longer matter for me. Writing plays has always been
Speaker 3: very tricky. I don't know a lot, I don't have
Speaker 3: a lot to say. I reach things very slowly, and
Speaker 3: I sometimes it seems facile and easy. And to me
Speaker 3: sometimes my thoughts and my sort of expressed opinions in
Speaker 3: plays seem hollow or naive even why because I know
Speaker 3: they're deeper truths always to be found and that I'm But.
Speaker 1: Don't you think that seeking them and being aware of
Speaker 1: that makes you more likely to find it than anybody else?
Speaker 1: You didn't go to college, did you know why you
Speaker 1: wind up educating yourself?
Speaker 3: I wish I'd gone to college. It was a depressed
Speaker 3: and unsettled kid. And why I don't. I think I
Speaker 3: wasn't at peace with probably any element of who I was,
Speaker 3: whether it was a sort of nascent intellectual or sort
Speaker 3: of pre expressive homosexual kid. Or you grew up where
Speaker 3: variously La.
Speaker 1: You were born in La and you live there to
Speaker 1: your how old seven?
Speaker 3: Then Brazil for three years in Rio, and then South
Speaker 3: Africa for six and a half years till I was eighteen, and.
Speaker 1: Your father was in the condensed milk business.
Speaker 3: My father worked for a giant multinational carnation milk. Yeah,
Speaker 3: it was a condensed milk business.
Speaker 1: Was so La, Brazil, South Africa and then back to
Speaker 1: La back and when you finally get back to LA.
Speaker 1: How old are you?
Speaker 3: Eighteen? So high school's over? I just finished high school.
Speaker 3: I'd sort of lost time through all the travels high
Speaker 3: school in South Africa, like I couldn't get used to
Speaker 3: things like cricket and corporal punishment. You know, you'd get
Speaker 3: caned for like not doing well on a spelling test,
Speaker 3: literally caned. And I think I was so busy trying
Speaker 3: to be sly and charming that I forgot how to
Speaker 3: be me. That I think led me to rebel against
Speaker 3: learning itself. So I was sort of interested in the
Speaker 3: few things. I was interested in literature history, but I
Speaker 3: wouldn't apply myself to anything except escape, and part of
Speaker 3: escape meant not going to college. I was really lonely,
Speaker 3: and I I kind of became a depressed kid.
Speaker 1: And manifest itself off. You can say, I think I
Speaker 1: did you know you were gay?
Speaker 3: Then yes, I definitely knew that. I knew that.
Speaker 1: And to your depression. Did it make you feel more isolated?
Speaker 3: Totally?
Speaker 1: I mean because it so it wasn't proactive the gay
Speaker 1: community there in nineteen three talking about getting caned.
Speaker 3: Yeah, well, I think my parents, who loved me very much,
Speaker 3: were distracted by their own terrors. There are certain families
Speaker 3: that are born in terror and live in.
Speaker 1: Terror, conceived in terror. I need you to write a
Speaker 1: play for me. I want to be called conceived in terror.
Speaker 1: There we go ahead.
Speaker 3: Well, no, I mean death of a Salesman is a
Speaker 3: family that lives in terror.
Speaker 1: You were howveled when you arrived in Durban ten So
Speaker 1: you were the.
Speaker 3: Eight years Yeah, I was there almost eight years.
Speaker 1: Critical time, ten years old. So all of your real
Speaker 1: back half of your childhood, your teenage years especially, you
Speaker 1: are in Durban.
Speaker 3: I guess I was seventeen or something when we left.
Speaker 1: But you had finished the high school program.
Speaker 3: No, no, I finished it in La You did where
Speaker 3: Beverly Hills High School?
Speaker 1: What was that like? I?
Speaker 3: You know, was the only kid I knew who rode
Speaker 3: their bike to school because everybody else's parents had given
Speaker 3: them a Fiat literally, yeah or something.
Speaker 1: Who were your friends then? Who did you become friends with? Anyone?
Speaker 3: Oh? Yeah? In fact, Jenny Livingston went on to make
Speaker 3: Paris's Burning Great documentary Tina Landau great theater director. Gina
Speaker 3: Gershaan my oldest friend from high school. We were in
Speaker 3: plays together in the drama department. So I became friends
Speaker 3: with and I say this with real respect and love
Speaker 3: with fellow freaks.
Speaker 1: We're taking a break, so stay with us. How are
Speaker 1: you feeling about yourself and about life that last year
Speaker 1: in Beverly Hills.
Speaker 3: I think I was scared to death still. I mean,
Speaker 3: it was just a new form of foreignness, but it
Speaker 3: had the patent of something very familiar to me. But
Speaker 3: you know, I remember being taken to a party really
Speaker 3: early on, and I had developed a kind of weird
Speaker 3: eye beforehand for art. I thought maybe I was going
Speaker 3: to be a painter or an art historian. And I
Speaker 3: walk into this house and there is a giant David
Speaker 3: Hockney and next to it is a giant Mother. Well,
Speaker 3: I'm standing in front of this giant painting that's famous
Speaker 3: that I've looked at in books Thames and Hudson art books.
Speaker 3: While I was in Durban at the Art Library of
Speaker 3: the University. The world was just very real and different,
Speaker 3: and it was easier to have sex and it was
Speaker 3: easier to function.
Speaker 1: Were you writing?
Speaker 3: I guess I was sort of writing, Yeah, what were
Speaker 3: you writing? I was writing really bad short stories about
Speaker 3: alienated Paul Bowle's kids Adrift in foreign countries, which is
Speaker 3: basically to tell you that it's still what I'm doing.
Speaker 3: It just looks slightly the wallpaper's prettier.
Speaker 1: Yeah, where were you living at that as? I was living.
Speaker 3: On friend's sofas, like the parents of children I went
Speaker 3: to high school with.
Speaker 1: I was.
Speaker 3: I was just a freak, you know, And I was
Speaker 3: at odds with my family at the time, you know,
Speaker 3: and I had escaped and it was just a nightmare.
Speaker 1: How do we get from there to fair Country? Gordon Davidson, you.
Speaker 3: Know in Pinocchio where he falls in with actors. I'm
Speaker 3: walking around. I ran into this girl I knew from
Speaker 3: high school. She said, what are you doing? And I'm
Speaker 3: sort of looking for a job. I think I'm starving
Speaker 3: to death. I'm not sure, she said to me, And
Speaker 3: I should have known. She said, well, my father just
Speaker 3: fired me. He needs to he needs a new assistant.
Speaker 3: And I was like, well, what does he do and
Speaker 3: she said, oh, he's a film producer.
Speaker 1: Who is the film producer?
Speaker 3: This is great guy and he was he a working producer.
Speaker 1: I'm only asking for a name to make so I thought.
Speaker 3: My first day at the office, he says to me,
Speaker 3: whatever you do answer the phones, but never pick up
Speaker 3: the phone. And I was like, I don't even know
Speaker 3: what that means. And he said, you'll do fine. And
Speaker 3: he had a gang of cronies, all of whom had
Speaker 3: contempt for the studio system and had worked around the
Speaker 3: edges of it, or in it, had done well, fallen
Speaker 3: out of favor, usually had destroyed themselves through my favorite thing,
Speaker 3: their own ambivalence. I found myself at home for the
Speaker 3: first time in my life with it when the nest
Speaker 3: of scorpions, Yes I did, I found myself. I said this,
Speaker 3: I know, yeah, because nobody is trying to pass. Yeah,
Speaker 3: it's a den of thieves. We're hitting the law here.
Speaker 3: It was still the days of speaker phone. They would
Speaker 3: have fights. They had a tower on Sunset Boulevard. They
Speaker 3: had a nest of rooms in a tower, and they
Speaker 3: would be fighting with each other and then they would
Speaker 3: suddenly be a pause. Someone would say, geez, if you
Speaker 3: could see what I see right now, that girl walking
Speaker 3: down Sunset she is so beautiful. The fight was over. Yeah,
Speaker 3: nothing meant anything. Cotic of sex, that's right. One of
Speaker 3: the masks for a glass of water is. In my
Speaker 3: first few weeks there nineteen eighty two. What do I know.
Speaker 3: I would go to the sink, bring a glass of water,
Speaker 3: spit it out like practically on me, and say this
Speaker 3: isn't water, and I would sug Yes, it's water. What
Speaker 3: are you talking about? That's water. I want professional water.
Speaker 3: And the whole time became about professional water.
Speaker 1: How long did that last? Three? Four?
Speaker 3: Like four some years? No?
Speaker 1: No, but it got You were in the scorpions looking
Speaker 1: down at the women's asses for four years, and.
Speaker 3: I would copy everything down. And so at the same
Speaker 3: time I started hanging around with these actors, there was
Speaker 3: a sort of an equally desperate contingent of avant gardist
Speaker 3: odd playwrights out there in La living on the fringes
Speaker 3: of everything. And so I lived between these two worlds,
Speaker 3: one of which was sort of drunk and druggy, and
Speaker 3: the other was insane megaltamia.
Speaker 1: I can't say the word meglo maniacal.
Speaker 3: Thank you, Megan, I'm here for maniacal.
Speaker 1: You just think of the words and I'll say that,
Speaker 1: thank you. We're going to beat each other.
Speaker 3: I know. It's like Bluetooth without the technology Bluetooth me
Speaker 3: go ahead. I had to come up with a play
Speaker 3: for one of these sort of workshop things that we
Speaker 3: would put together, and one of these playwrights said to me, so,
Speaker 3: what's your play and me bullshitting, which is something I
Speaker 3: just did. I said, yeah, it's called Mislansky Zelenski on
Speaker 3: the spot. I just came up with the names on
Speaker 3: those guys. Yeah, I said, yeah, it's called Mislanskisky.
Speaker 1: He's just based it on the guys in the tower.
Speaker 3: So it's just them talking and I put all my
Speaker 3: notes together and we did it, and.
Speaker 1: It was the first one you wrote. Yeah, now you're
Speaker 1: on Broadway. The show's a big success. People have said
Speaker 1: wonderful things about the show. I worshiped Stacy. I mean,
Speaker 1: he is one of the great wild mustangs of all
Speaker 1: theater history. And in this piece, it is that Reagan crowd,
Speaker 1: it is that Bush crowd, it is that blue blood
Speaker 1: Republican crowd, the conservative crowd.
Speaker 3: Stacey captures that good. I wrote the part for him.
Speaker 1: You wrote the partment.
Speaker 3: Oh yeah, I knew that there was nobody who could
Speaker 3: capture that better. Ever, we'd worked together before, he'd done
Speaker 3: Ten Unknowns at the Taper, and it was a revelation.
Speaker 1: Because the character has to have a dignity as well. Yeah,
Speaker 1: Stacy rings in a guy. We sit there and go,
Speaker 1: I get it. I would have followed him. I wanted
Speaker 1: him around.
Speaker 3: He's great and I love him so much. You know.
Speaker 3: He and Joe didn't know each other, and so they
Speaker 3: got on the phone before rehearsal and Stacy says to Joe,
Speaker 3: you know, I've worked with Robbie before. We worked together before,
Speaker 3: and I know him well. And do you know him
Speaker 3: if you worked with him? And how well do you
Speaker 3: know him? And Joe says, I kind of know him
Speaker 3: and when we lived together for twelve years. But that's Stacy.
Speaker 3: He's like, oh damn. The great thing about Stacy is
Speaker 3: he brings centuries of actors honor onto that stage with him.
Speaker 3: The honor of honoring fellow actors, the honor of listening,
Speaker 3: the privilege of being an actor, the privilege of being
Speaker 3: in the theater, not missing a single show in his seventies,
Speaker 3: the rituals of it, the privilege of working in the
Speaker 3: theater is the thing that has been of everything that's
Speaker 3: happened to me, just the great honor of being in
Speaker 3: the American theater in some capacity is what I'm left with.
Speaker 3: That it's a privilege to be in it. I'm lucky
Speaker 3: to have found my way back to it. What's institutionalized
Speaker 3: in working in the theater is a hunt for truth totally.
Speaker 3: It doesn't exist in the movie business and the television business. No,
Speaker 3: do you know what you're doing next? Are you on
Speaker 3: to something now that you're writing? Who knows? I can't
Speaker 3: tell you. I just can't tell you're scribbling. Yeah, I'm
Speaker 3: supposed to be doing things. I'm a mess at all times.
Speaker 1: John Robin Dates says he feels like more of a
Speaker 1: growth up as a flight. When he started out in
Speaker 1: la he was CouchSurfing at the homes of his friend's parents.
Speaker 1: Things are different.
Speaker 3: Now I have a home, I grow stuff, I'm responsible
Speaker 3: to people.
Speaker 1: I have a dog. I have a dog. He has
Speaker 1: three what's a dog's.
Speaker 3: Name, Trip? Trip? Yeah, here's three legs. He's a great dog.
Speaker 1: I'm Alec Baldwin. Here's the thing that's brought to you
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