30 minute read
Speaking to the Audience
MICHEL HAUSMANN + MOISÉS KAUFMAN IN CONVERSATION WITH ANNE BOGART
In September, over Zoom, Anne Bogart spoke with Moisés Kaufman, the founder of Tectonic Theater Project, and Michel Hausmann, Artistic Director of Miami New Drama and Bogart’s former student at Columbia University School of the Arts, where she runs the Graduate Directing Concentration. The occasion for this interview was a new play: the world-premiere stage adaptation, in Spanish with English subtitles, of Las Aventuras de Juan Planchard, written and directed by Kaufman from Jonathan Jakubowicz’s acclaimed 2016 novel; the play began performances at the Colony Theatre in Miami Beach in October as a co-production between Tectonic Theater Project and Miami New Drama. (Founded by Hausmann and Kaufman, Miami New Drama develops and produces new works both in English and Spanish; Bogart has called it “the most exciting young theatre company in the South.”) Before the conversation turned to theatre, they talked about political events in Venezuela, where both men were born and raised.
ANNE BOGART | It’s appropriate to start with Venezuela because it has a lot to do with why the two of you are sitting there in Miami right now. Moisés, I’d like to ask you to tell us a little bit about the genesis of this play, your first play in Spanish, and what you hope it might achieve, if you know what I mean. Obviously, a play doesn’t “achieve” something, but I think you’re on a mission a little bit.
MOISÉS KAUFMAN | I hope this will be a bilingual play that will be done all over the country. It’s a play about the rise of authoritarianism in a democratic country. (Something I fear we can all relate to right now.) And it has subtitles when the characters speak in Spanish, so it’ll be accessible to everyone. If we’re serious about diversity, equity, and inclusion, shouldn’t we be creating work that speaks in the language of the people we’re trying to reach? Isn’t it time we have more bilingual plays in the repertory?
I left Venezuela and came to New York in 1987, and Chávez came into power in 1999. And when Chávez came to power, for many of us here, we could see that underneath all of his so-called “socialist idealism” lurked a violent dictator. Sure enough, from 1999 until he died, we saw Venezuela’s democracy slowly perish. Crime and corruption ran rampant; inflation skyrocketed, democratic institutions were taken over by Chávez’s cronies, and in the previously wealthy country people starved to death. Also, Venezuela reached the highest murder index in the world.
ANNE | Who was killing whom in those days?
MOISÉS | Chavez let crime flourish in order to keep control of the populace. By creating havoc in the streets, people were afraid to leave their houses after 6 p.m. My sister was kidnapped, and they asked for a ransom.
ANNE | Did your family pay the ransom?
MOISÉS | They did. Over the years it felt like I was in a production of The Cherry Orchard watching my native country just vanish in front of my eyes.
And for me personally, it was doubly hard. The plays I create often take place at the intersection of the personal and the political. So when I started witnessing what was happening, I felt this incredible responsibility to write a play about Venezuela. I wanted to join the international outcry against the crimes that were being committed to silence the opposition. But how could I write a play about Venezuela when I hadn’t lived there in 20 years? This weighed heavily on my conscience. I went to marches and I did whatever I could from New York—I spoke against the government in the press, and I was always very vocal. But it always weighed on me that I wasn’t using my craft to speak out against Chávez and his band of criminals.
Then a mutual friend, Jonathan Jakubowicz, wrote this novel called Las Aventuras de Juan Planchard, and it became one of the highest-selling novels in Latin American history. It tells the story of Juan Planchard, an everyman who joins Chavez’s Bolivarian Revolution and becomes obscenely wealthy through corrupt dealings. It’s a brilliant novel that portrays what happened to the people of Venezuela, and the way Jakubowicz writes it echoes Richard III’s story. The first words of the play are, “My name is Juan Planchard. I’m 29 years old. I have $50 million in my bank account. I have an apartment in Madrid, an apartment in New York, a house in Caracas, a private plane, and I am convinced that everything that I did for the Bolivarian Venezuelan Revolution was correct, and that my children will thank me for it.”
ANNE | Have you been working from that novel in conference with the writer?
MOISÉS | I got the rights, and I wrote the play based on the novel. Then I had the writer come in and he’s been giving me notes.
MICHEL HAUSMANN | I just want to interrupt you for a second. This all feels like it’s such an easy translation from a novel to a play. Any mortal would read the novel and say, “Oh, this is a big Hollywood movie.” Nobody in their right mind would say, “Oh, this novel that takes place in private jets, in Caracas, in the Barrios, on helicopters”— nobody in their right mind would say, “Oh, this is a play. It’s Richard III.” No one, no one…except Moisés Kaufman.
But Moisés saw the theatricality of it, and he saw how this is somebody talking to the audience, talking to a jury, and that’s why you fall in love with theatre over and over again—because you can do all of that in theatre. And the work of the director really in this case is where the genius happens. How do you tell a story that starts in an opera and then it moves into a taxi cab where there’s some fellatio going on, and then arrives at the Statue of Liberty? The way Moisés created that sequence really speaks about the director as an artist, the director as creating a layer of storytelling that is genius.
ANNE | Moisés, how do you achieve that?
MOISÉS | The novel is written in the first-person singular. And I could immediately hear Juan speaking to the audience. Juan Planchard can come and say, “Hello, my name is Juan Planchard. Let me tell you this story. I was in Vegas with a Brazilian actress….” Then the Brazilian actress comes onstage, and Juan joins her in the re-enactment of a scene. Then he steps out of the scene and goes back to being the kind of Shakespearean narrator of the play. By doing it this way, the actor/narrator can take us from one location to another with a few sentences. It’s very theatrical and economic. We workshopped it at Tectonic Theater Project before coming to Miami and saw that it worked really well.
But then, we found that in the second act, when Juan begins to lose control of the situation, other characters in the play take over the narration. They become a sort of Greek Chorus. So he’s losing his power by losing the narration. Imagine if in the third act of Richard III, Lady Anne begins to narrate the story….
ANNE | That’s structurally really interesting, Moisés.
MOISÉS | Well, who gets to tell whose story? Especially in a story about a dictatorship? What’s exciting to me is that seven of the nine actors are Venezuelan expats: artists who had to leave the country because they were vocal against the government. Five of them are unable to return to Venezuela because they would be imprisoned by the government. So here’s a group of exiled actors in the U.S., creating a play of resistance against the Venezuelan government. I love that they are the ones who get to tell this story. But also…the actors periodically burst into tears because it’s so painful for them.
MICHEL | Some of the actors in this cast were the biggest actors of Venezuela, people who spent 40 years making a career. Elba Escobar and Orlando Urdaneta, they acted in 40 movies in—
MOISÉS | They were the equivalent to Meryl Streep and Robert DeNiro in Venezuela.
MICHEL | That’s right.
ANNE | That’s amazing. Moisés, did you write the play knowing you were going to do it at Miami New Drama, and did you write for specific actors?
MOISÉS | When I first had the idea, I went to Michel and I said, “I love this novel. I want to do it with Tectonic. I would love to do a co-production with Miami New Drama…”
Let’s backtrack a little bit and talk about Miami New Drama because it’s a very strange story that I think will contextualize Juan Planchard. A few years back, Michel had this idea of creating a theatre company in Miami. Michel, why don’t you tell that story?
ANNE | Oh, I have to say I saw the idea born when he was at Columbia in grad school. Especially after visiting artist classes, Michel would always come up and say, “Well, I don’t like this because that’s not how a theatre should start. I’m going to start a theatre.” I remember, Michel, you were very clear about what you wanted to do.
"That notion of making a connection with the audience feels completely necessary right now, otherwise why are we here?" — Anne Bogart
MICHEL | I knew I didn’t want to be a director-for-hire; running a theatre company, which is what I used to do in Venezuela, is what excited me. The first conversation I had was with Moisés. I said, “Moisés, listen, I have this idea,” and Moisés looked me in the eye and said, “That’s a really stupid idea. Miami, there’s not a lot of theatre in Miami. I don’t think it’s going to work.” And three hours later he called me and said, “You know what? I’ve been thinking about it. It’s actually a great idea and let’s do it together.” That’s really how it happened.
ANNE | What year was that, Michel?
MICHEL | Maybe 2014, 2015. The first show we produced in Miami was in 2016, which was my thesis at Columbia, The Golem of Havana. I rented this theatre, the one I’m in now—there was a for-profit company running it. The play became such a big hit that I went to City Hall of Miami Beach, and I said, “Hey, you have this amazing theatre, almost empty. Give it to us and we’ll turn it into a world-class regional theatre.” The commissioners voted on it, and they voted unanimously to give us the keys to the building. After living in a place where democracy doesn’t work, seeing democracy work….
What we feel like we do correctly is listen. Miami is a diverse community and we let that community tell their stories. We had a show about Elián Gonzalez [Elián], we had a show about the Miami mayoral race [The Cuban Vote], we did a show on the cocaine era of the 1980s [Confessions of a Cocaine Cowboy]. We’re doing a show about the race riots that changed the face of Miami in 1980 [Dangerous Days, based on the book The Year of Dangerous Days by Edna Buchanan]. We just had a wonderful show, Create Dangerously [based on the book by Edwidge Danticat]; Liliana Blain-Cruz wrote it about the Haitian community, and she came to direct it. When you do work that looks like the community, the community comes.
We take the word “regional” in regional theatre very seriously. If you look at our season and I ask you, where do you think this season takes place? Miami. There’s just no other way. We are regional theatres. We have a responsibility to tell stories about us.
ANNE | Two things strike me. One is from the beginning, when you first came to Miami, you did a show that spoke directly to people who are in your neighborhood, in the best sense of the word neighborhood, and who it makes sense to, and I think that’s why you were given the key to the theatre, because it felt necessary. Secondly, post-COVID, it seems like in the culture we’re living in where, as you describe, Michel, so many regional theatres are so lost, there’s something about the relationship to the audience that has become clarified to me. I was talking with my friend Leon Ingulsrud shortly after the theatre started opening after COVID; he went to see a show and I said, “How was the show, Leon?” He said, “Not so good.” I said, “Why?” He said, “Well, first of all, they never said hello to the audience.”
I’m thinking of the first line of your play, Moisés. What is it again?
MOISÉS | “My name is Juan Planchard and everything I did for the Bolivarian Revolution was right and I will be thanked by my children.”
ANNE | That notion of making a connection with the audience feels completely necessary right now, otherwise why are we here? It seems like you are in the right place at the right time for the cultural necessity that we’re in now. Does that come from both of you understanding where we’re at or what we’re feeling?
MOISÉS | Michel and I co-founded Miami New Drama together. But this is his vision. Not only is it his vision, the reason why it’s having so much success is because it’s a very, very daring vision. I am running Tectonic Theater Project, so I am not in on the day-to-day. Michel is running it day-to-day, and Michel has an incredible vision.
One of the first plays he did was Our Town; with permission from the estate, one of the families spoke Spanish, another one spoke English, and the other one spoke Haitian. There were subtitles so that everybody in the audience could understand. To me, there is a daring in Michel’s vision that is really, at this moment in 2023 in America, what’s going to be needed if the theatre is going to survive. Meaning, how do we speak immediately, viscerally to our contemporary audiences? In all their diversity? In their own language?
One of the four slots of his current season is going to be in a museum where actors tell stories about the paintings there. Whether it’s The Golem of Havana, which is a musical that spoke to the Cuban population here in Miami, or that Our Town, he’s directly addressing his audience. In 2020 during the pandemic—he was walking to the theatre, he saw that all the stores around the theatre were empty, so he called the store owners and said, “Can I put a play on to remind people of your store?” He commissioned seven playwrights to write seven short plays and made an evening entitled Seven Deadly Sins. The audience would sit outside the store and the play would happen behind the window—and the audience could hear with headphones what the actors were saying. The idea was so good that I asked for permission to do it in New York, and Tectonic brought it in, and it was a gigantic success in New York too. [Seven Deadly Sins was produced in empty storefronts in New York’s Meatpacking District in July 2021, produced by Tectonic Theater Project and Madison Wells Live.]
MICHEL | Actually having a co-production with Tectonic Theater on something like Juan Planchard is a dream come true, because Moisés is a big artist, with big ideas. We got to a point where we can now collaborate hopefully on a yearly basis, where Tectonic has a South Florida partner. Tectonic is an amazing company without a physical theatre, which is something we have [the Colony Theatre], and now we’re going to have a second space.
ANNE | Michel, tell us about the second space.
MICHEL | It’s the first floor of a garage, but it’s sort of a fancy Miami garage. It has high ceilings and it’s 17,000 square feet. We’re going to have a restaurant, a lobby gallery, a rehearsal space larger than the footprint of our stage, a 200-seat black box, and our office space.
ANNE | Brilliant.
MICHEL | The brilliant part of it is that you know who decided we are not only going to have $7.5 million for that space but also $7.5 million dollars to refurbish the Colony Theatre? The voters of Miami Beach. It was a ballot initiative. Voters decided by 65 percent to pay more taxes in order for culture to be at the forefront of the future of the city.
ANNE | Did you have to lobby for that?
MICHEL | Oh yes, absolutely. We lobbied; we created a campaign. We did all that fun stuff. And 65 percent of the voters—that’s a landslide.
MOISÉS | I have a terrible fear that we’re going to lose Michel to politics.
MICHEL | Zero chance. Myerav, my wife, will never let me.
ANNE | Well, you already are an ambassador. You’re an ambassador for the arts.
MICHEL | It’s so easy to be an ambassador when I talk about Moisés. My job is so easy. What Moisés is doing now with this show is sublime. It’s what theatre should be. It’s not just the idea that theatre needs to have a space at the table, it’s that theatre should help lead the conversation. The Laramie Project helped lead a conversation that we’re still having. It wasn’t just an asterisk, it propelled something.
To a certain degree, you walk now out in Manhattan, and you see all those Venezuelan migrants, over 100,000 of them who are overwhelming the capacities of New York City shelters. These are people who walked and crossed a very dangerous jungle between Colombia and Panama, and they walked all the way to New York and people have no idea who they are. Why? We are having all these conversations about what to do with those migrants. Here’s a story about how all of this happened, how we all let it happen, in a way. So I think that this play [Juan Planchard] is going to start the conversation from a different perspective.
ANNE | I’m so curious about what Michel is seeing when he comes to your rehearsals, Moisés. Michel, when you walk into rehearsal, what do you see that’s blowing you away in terms of what he’s doing as a director?
MICHEL | I’m a director, so I read something, and I imagine it. I don’t do it on purpose. I read something and I imagine it happening. We’ve been workshopping this play with Tectonic for four or five years. How long, Moisés?
MOISÉS | We were going to do it before the pandemic and then the pandemic happened. So we workshopped it for two years, and then the pandemic happened and now we’re back.
MICHEL | So it’s been four or five years that this play has also lived in my mind. The fact that I am surprised by what I’m seeing is shocking because I have thought about this play so much. And I always wonder, how is Moisés going to do this? What I’m always very shocked about Moisés’s work is just how simple it is, but behind that simplicity, there’s a ton of hours and genius behind it. It’s both so simple and kind of the only way to do it, and I would’ve never thought of it. I don’t want to be that artistic director who hangs out too long, but for me it’s a joy to go to rehearsal, and every time I go, it’s just to see what Moisés understands the audience can do in their own minds. Moisés knows how to put the elements so that the audience brings them together, and that’s where the magic of theatre happens.
ANNE | That’s beautifully said. I’m curious, Moisés, you’ve got your playwright hat and you’ve got your director hat. Do they get confused or how do you manage to—
MOISÉS | They fight all the time.
ANNE | Do they? In rehearsal?
MOISÉS | Less in rehearsal. I don’t want the actors to see them fight, but they do some. Sometimes the playwright wins, sometimes the director wins.
The thing that interests me theatrically about this play is that every major city in America has a Latinx population. Right now what happened in Venezuela—the rise of a strongman, of a dictator, an authoritarian figure—is happening in so many other countries in Latin America. In Mexico, in Peru, in Argentina. There is this wave; when Obrador was elected, basically one of the things that the people in Mexico said is, “How is it possible that we elected this man? Haven’t we seen what’s happened in Venezuela?” Around the world there is a fascination with authoritarian figures at the moment. We see it here with Trump. So I think the play speaks not only to Latinx communities across the country but to everyone.
ANNE | Can I insert something? The fact that you said that the main character is actually blamed for so much of people’s misery is very Greek. It’s the wisdom of the Greeks, in the sense of The Persians portraying the enemies, and that’s where it’s not agitprop. You create a dialectic between what you believe in and the confusion of misled individuals. I think that’s brilliant.
MOISÉS | You gave me chills, Anne, but that’s exactly right. The first act of the play is Shakespearean, one man guiding the audience: I’m going to seduce Lady Anne, and you’re going to watch it, and then after you watch it, I’m going to tell you what I think. But then in the second act, I wanted to fracture that and make it into a Greek play with a Chorus, where the Chorus is the people. In the first act he’s saying, “I’m going through this.” In the second act, people say, “Juan entered this room, and nobody wanted to look at him because we all felt he was responsible for this debacle.” All of a sudden, the audience is hearing from the people affected by Juan’s decisions. They take control of the narrative.
So I think that formally, what we’re trying to do is daring. It’s a play that poses questions about ethics and about morality and about what compromises do we make? Juan Planchard was a middle-class guy and all of a sudden, he has the ability to make millions of dollars with one phone call to a government agent. And he says, “Why would I be the only idiot in Venezuela who’s not taking advantage of this bonanza?” He begins to make moral (or immoral) decisions that eventually in the play lead to a tragic outcome for him, but until then, it’s a very complicated ritual. I think it’s the best novel that has been written in Latin America in the last 20 years.
ANNE | As you’re speaking, Moisés, I’m thinking this would speak to people all around the United States, not to mention Latin America. I don’t know what I’m asking you, but it seems like that might be true.
MOISÉS | Yes, definitely. Look, it’s my first bilingual play in Spanish/English, so it’s a very emotional thing for me. But I believe this play should be done in theatres all over America! Because it speaks to the threat of authoritarianism, it speaks to the moral compromises we make to get ahead. And I think after the pandemic, American audiences are very used to watching films with subtitles. I think as a culture, we’re ready to have bilingual plays done in the regional theatre circuit.
One of the things that happened to me when I came to New York, as a native Spanish speaker, I remember waking up one day after five months living here, and thinking, “Oh my God, I was dreaming in English,” and there was sorrow because I felt like I had just lost something. Working with these Venezuelan actors being in the rehearsal room speaking Spanish—I think this is a kind of homecoming for me. I grew up seeing these actors’ work on film and on stage, and now I’m working with them. It’s been very emotional. One of the actors said to me the other day, “Yes, they exiled us, but they were not able to exile our imagination, or our desire to tell our story.” The actor I mentioned before who was a big star there told me, “Moisés, I’m loving every minute of this, but there is such sorrow because I’m now in my seventies. This is the time in Venezuela where I would get a theatre named after me or a street named after me. And it’s not that I want a theatre named after me, but I would get that kind of recognition after having spent my life devoted to this art form, and instead, I am in exile trying to make ends meet, doing commercials for soap. This is something else that the so-called ‘revolution’ took from me.”
But yes, the idea is to take it to other countries in Latin America, and to bring it to New York. Then tour it around the U.S.
ANNE | Moisés, you usually are in rehearsal as a director speaking English, and now you’re in rehearsal speaking Spanish. Are you a different person or different director in each language?
MOISÉS | I’m a different person, and also what I found is that a lot of my technical language in directing, I acquired in English. So when I’m trying to direct in Spanish, the first week I felt like a pretzel. I didn’t know what language I was speaking at any given moment.
ANNE | Do you feel freer in one or the other? And this is also a question for Michel.
MOISÉS | I feel a kinship with these actors that is very unusual, very deep. When I was making The Laramie Project, the American actors had a much greater experience of what we were talking about than I did; I was the outsider. Now when I’m making this, even though I wasn’t in Venezuela, I understand them viscerally.
ANNE | And do you think you have a different sense of humor, your Venezuelan sense of humor?
MOISÉS | Definitely.
ANNE | Can you describe what that difference is?
MOISÉS | It is more picaro, mischievous. I think I’m more mischievous in Spanish than I am in English.
ANNE | Do you agree with that, Michel?
MICHEL | I definitely see. It’s a joy to see Moisés directing in Spanish. Actually, 15 years ago or more, we did a show together in Venezuela, which I do believe was your real first Spanish directing experience.
MOISÉS | But you directed that.
MICHEL | With you, but yes.
ANNE | What was that?
MICHEL | We did Gross Indecency in Venezuela. [Michel and Moisés codirected the Venezuelan premiere of Gross Indecency: The Three Trials of Oscar Wilde in 2010.] All through my first semester at Columbia, the show was playing in Venezuela with great success.
"It’s not just the idea that theatre needs to have a space at the table, it’s that theatre should help lead the conversation." — Michel Hausmann
ANNE | I’m remembering that now.
MICHEL | Yeah, yeah. There’s also a lot of, what do they say, code switching. Venezuelans, when we’re working with Venezuelans, it’s a more relaxed environment. The actors have their own way of operating, and sometimes it can be a little frustrating. The Venezuelan rehearsal process is longer, so it’s also a matter of putting them in shape because they might believe that they have more time than they really have. And so the process, trying to inhabit both worlds at the same time, could be quite challenging, but I think to a certain degree it is also freeing. There’s a shorthand with the Venezuelan actors that might be not as easy with American actors.
ANNE | Moisés, you have to go back into rehearsal in 10 minutes. But I want to ask you, Michel, you have this new space opening, which sounds amazing. When is that going to open?
MICHEL | Well, we hope that by the fall of 2025 we will be operating.
ANNE | That’s pretty quick. That’s great. And can you describe, Michel, your dreams for the future?
MICHEL | Well, I think that before we can get to dream of the future, we have to figure out how to deal with the present. I think that we are in the midst of a really big crisis. The Mark Taper Forum, Williamstown Theatre Festival…how many theatres are cutting in half their seasons, et cetera? There’s a real reason behind it. Production costs have gone up a lot. When we started, our shows would be $350,000 per show. Now they are at least a half million, but we didn’t see that increase in audience. I think that what’s happening throughout the country is production costs are going up and the audiences are not there to make up for that gap. We also have to refocus on what it is that we care about as storytellers and go back to that, because we don’t have the money to do what we used to do. Part of the reason for me going into a museum and trying to do a play there, between you and me, is that it’s not going to cost $500,000; it’s going to cost $200,000.
MOISÉS | Between you, me, and the readers of SDC Journal.
MICHEL | It’s also out of necessity, but I’m not ashamed of saying that we’re doing it out of necessity. Some of the greatest things come out of necessity.
ANNE | Which museum are you going into?
MICHEL | You know the Rubell Museum? It’s really beautiful, I think it’s the best collection of contemporary art in America. They have two museums, one in Miami and one in Washington, DC. They’re privately owned. In the spirit of what we learned from Seven Deadly Sins, we’re commissioning six playwrights to write plays that could only take place in front of specific works of art. If you do that play anywhere else, it doesn’t work; it creates a conversation between the museum world and the theatre world.
MOISÉS | Miami is such an event-oriented city. People there want to go to Art Basel; they want to go to a club that has a new thing. What Michel is trying to do is reach those audiences and tell them, “Hey, wait a minute. You want a real event? Come see this.” He’s done it in several different ways; during COVID he took it to the street. Audiences that had never gone to see a show at Miami New Drama came because all of a sudden, they were hungry to see something. “Oh, what? I’m going to be sitting on the street looking inside the store window and the actors are going to be inside the store, and I’m going to be listening through the window? That sounds kind of cool.” He’s doing this thing with the museum, where people go out into the museum. Similarly, I think Juan Planchard is going to bring a lot of Venezuelans who don’t go to the theatre because this is going to speak directly to their experience, and they’ve been longing for somebody to join the outcry against the horror that has happened.
MICHEL | Juan Planchard starts, “I am this guy, and I did this,” and he’s talking directly to the audience. That’s the one thing Netflix cannot do. They now have our playwrights because all of our playwrights are working there, but they don’t have that. In a way, that’s what Moisés for 30 years has mastered, this idea that we are in a room talking to an audience and engaging you. His plays are using the elements that we have in theatre that Netflix doesn’t have. They can tell square stories, rectangular stories better than we can, they cannot tell 3D stories.
MOISÉS | Film is a literal medium. Theatre uses the imagination of the audience. An actor turns to the right and says, “Oh my God, I don’t want to go into that lake,” and the audience sees the lake. We don’t need to have the water. In this kind of dramatic literary form, the possibility of having an actor look at the audience’s eye and say, “I stole money from you. I was with the government. We stole money from Venezuela, but you know what? My children will thank me for it.” All of the people who are in that theatre are going to be outraged by that speech, and then he’s going to tell you, “Well, wouldn’t you have done the same?” And all of a sudden, they’re going to go, “Wait a minute, I didn’t do the same. That’s why I’m here.”
I believe, as I think all three of us believe, that the stage is the place where we can be having the most crucial and the most visceral and the most intimate conversations about ourselves as social beings and as members of a society.
"I believe...that the stage is the place where we can be having the most crucial and the most visceral and the most intimate conversations about ourselves as social beings and as members of a society." — Moisés Kaufman
