Pod Insights Here's The Thing with Alec Baldwin Oskar Eustis Makes Theater for the People About this episode Oskar Eustis is a theater director, dramaturg, and the current Artistic Director of the renowned Public Theater in New York City. Throughout his career, Oskar Eustis has been dedicated to making the theater more accessible, uplifting new voices in playwriting, and the development of new plays in addition to directing and producing the classics. Among the productions he has helped bring to life are “Angels in America” and the Tony-winning “Hamilton”. Oskar Eustis has worked as a director, dramaturg, and artistic director for theaters around the United States. He has also produced and directed Shakespeare productions nationwide, notably The Public Theater’s annual (and free) Shakespeare in the Park at the Delacorte Theater in Central Park. He is a professor of dramatic writing and arts and public policy at New York University and has held professorships at UCLA, Middlebury College and Brown University, where he founded and chaired the Trinity Rep/Brown University consortium for professional theater training.
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1:37 Alec Baldwin? 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 2017 Shakespeare in the Park production of Julius Caesar.
2:14 Alec Baldwin? 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, Middlebury College, and Brown University. Oscar Eustace is ironically a college dropout and graduated from high school when he was 15. I was struck by his independence at such a young age and curious if he would characterize his younger self as self-sufficient.
2:42 Speaker 05 I was in Fritz, yeah.
2:44 Alec Baldwin? And where were you then?
2:45 Speaker 05 I was in Minneapolis.
2:46 Alec Baldwin? You were in Minneapolis?
2:47 Speaker 05 Yeah. Actually, I was part of Minneapolis's last ditch attempt to avoid forced busing. In 1972, 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 a 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 50 white hippies, bust them into an all-black school, and give them special privileges.
3:29 Speaker 05 It didn't work very well, and so I got out at 15, but barely. I was actually in high school with Prince.
3:37 Alec Baldwin? Are you kidding me?
3:39 Speaker 05 No.
3:40 Alec Baldwin? Was he 15 going, was he getting out of there? He was black, so...
3:42 Speaker 05 Yeah, well, I was older than him, and he was just the weird, small kid with the guitar. I just, I can't claim that I recognized his genius.
3:50 Alec Baldwin? Yeah, didn't get it done. But when you say 50 hippie kids, you're in, what year is this?
3:57 Speaker 05 Seventy-two.
3:58 Alec Baldwin? So when you're 15 when you're 72?
4:00 Speaker 05 No, actually, 73 is when I graduated, and that was when I was 15.
4:03 Alec Baldwin? You're 15. But what was that environment like back then? Was it that nurturing of, you know, alternative kind of educational patterns and things like that?
4:12 Speaker 05 My high school experience was particularly rough. And I wouldn't trade it for anything, though, because I went in there with a trajectory that was probably going to land me in the academy, or perhaps in a 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.
4:37 Alec Baldwin? Now, your parents, you had a stepfather who raised you, correct?
4:40 Speaker 05 Stepfather and my biological mother, but also, after he sobered up, my biological father and my stepmother. So I have four parents.
4:49 Alec Baldwin? How old were you when they got divorced, your parents?
4:50 Speaker 05 Ten.
4:51 Alec Baldwin? You were ten?
4:51 Speaker 05 Yeah.
4:52 Alec Baldwin? And they, but they stayed in that general community in the Minneapolis?
4:54 Speaker 05 Well, they actually were in southern Minnesota. And when they remarried, everybody moved up to Minneapolis. So I moved to Minneapolis.
5:00 Alec Baldwin? And when did you, you and the crew head over to, was it the Netherlands? Where did you go? Berlin? I can't keep track of your travels.
5:08 Speaker 05 Yeah, no, no. What actually happened is as soon as my mother and stepfather had an empty nest, which was when I-
5:15 Alec Baldwin? Was fifteen.
5:16 Speaker 05 Yeah, 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.
5:27 Alec Baldwin? Both of them?
5:28 Speaker 05 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 Schauspiel House there. But I went and visited them regularly.
5:40 Alec Baldwin? The what house?
5:41 Speaker 05 It's called the Schauspiel 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 it.
5:50 Alec Baldwin? And you went there?
5:50 Speaker 05 Yeah.
5:51 Alec Baldwin? To do what?
5:52 Speaker 05 Founded a experimental second stage called Das Labor, the laboratory, which still exists.
5:58 Alec Baldwin? How old were you then?
5:59 Speaker 05 Nineteen.
6:00 Alec Baldwin? You say it still exists? Does the program with Trinity and Brown still exist that you found to get there? So they all lived on?
6:05 Speaker 05 So far.
6:06 Alec Baldwin? Right.
6:06 Speaker 05 Yeah.
6:08 Alec Baldwin? The public's still open too, right?
6:10 Speaker 05 I haven't killed it yet. We're trying to keep, we're trying to keep everything alive. The second day 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.
6:25 Alec Baldwin? And they let you tour London and Edinburgh when you were 14?
6:29 Speaker 05 Yeah, I went around a lot. My parents accepted my independence with a very good grace.
6:35 Alec Baldwin? Something you fought for. They didn't encourage you?
6:38 Speaker 05 What?
6:38 Alec Baldwin? Or both?
6:39 Speaker 05 They never took legal action to prevent me from doing what I wanted.
6:43 Alec Baldwin? Legally or otherwise?
6:44 Speaker 05 They occasionally disapproved of how wisely 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 me.
6:58 Alec Baldwin? Why were they right to do that?
6:59 Speaker 05 Well, because...
7:00 Alec Baldwin? You made the most of it.
7:01 Speaker 05 I, exactly. I did not waste my life. And I'm happy to say that by the time I was about 30, all of my parents recognized that fully and embraced what I'd made out of my life. And so for the last 35 years or so, I had full parental support. Most of them are dead now, I'm afraid, but I was lucky enough to, to watch my mother glory in what I'd done with my life, which is a feeling I cherish.
7:29 Alec Baldwin? When do you come back to the United States after Zurich?
7:32 Speaker 05 I moved back full-time in 1981. I'm 22 and I moved back to San Francisco, actually.
7:39 Alec Baldwin? And you were involved in the theater out there for quite a while?
7:41 Speaker 05 Oh, yeah. And I stayed, San Francisco's where I grew up. That's where I spent my 20s.
7:46 Alec Baldwin? You were at the Eureka Theater for quite a while?
7:49 Speaker 05 10 years.
7:49 Alec Baldwin? 10 years?
7:50 Speaker 05 10 years.
7:51 Alec Baldwin? Why?
7:51 Speaker 05 Well, you know, when, there was a mall...
7:54 Alec Baldwin? Not-for-profit theater?
7:55 Speaker 05 Oh, yeah. Tiny not-for-profit theater, 99 seats. It's where I became the artist that I've tried to become. It's where I became the person that, that I've tried to become.
8:05 Alec Baldwin? In what way?
8:05 Speaker 05 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 sort of fully immersed in the experimental theater scene. And, you know, at that point in the seventies, you may remember, the counterculture didn't distinguish between politically radical and aesthetically radical. And it was all sort of this mess of a counterculture. And I moved sort of freely in that. But about 1980, after a couple of years of living in Europe, I began to recognize
8:46 Speaker 05 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, a kind 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. I, you know, I remember Christmas of 1980, weeping in Zurich, listening to Patti 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 then I had to try to make my work reflect the content of my politics, which both meant
9:29 Speaker 05 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 time, I started to deal with plays, because I recognized that you needed playwrights to do what I wanted to do, both in terms of regional audiences.
9:56 Alec Baldwin? The opposite of what you were doing in the...
9:57 Speaker 05 Exactly.
9:58 Alec Baldwin? In the seventies.
9:59 Speaker 05 Exactly.
10:00 Alec Baldwin? In La Mama.
10:01 Speaker 05 And I have not regretted it for a moment. It was the big shift of my life.
10:04 Alec Baldwin? 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 Kline, Bill Hurt, Raoul Julia, Kazao, all of them was like, Merrill, of course, you made your bones in the theater, you flew out to LA to get a paycheck.
10:21 Speaker 05 Right.
10:22 Alec Baldwin? 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.
10:31 Speaker 05 Right.
10:31 Alec Baldwin? I told Sam Waterston, I said, every fucking guy I knew in New York had that fucking hammer poster on the wall of their apartment in New York.
10:38 Speaker 05 I have it on my wall right now.
10:40 Alec Baldwin? When I read this about you, I just see this guy, independence is the key.
10:45 Speaker 05 Yeah.
10:45 Alec Baldwin? This is what I want to do now. Now, there seems like there's a shelf life to everything you do. I mean, then you go from San Francisco to
10:51 Speaker 05 To LA.
10:52 Alec Baldwin? The Music Center.
10:53 Speaker 05 And then to Rhode Island, then to New York. In a way, that's right. But something happened to me when I was a teenager and first running way to Soho, which is, there was and is a great experimental theater called Mabo Mines, which at that time I was a groupie of Lee Brewer and Joanne Akleides. I followed them around the country, I loved 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 Mabo Mines groupie, but I was 16 years old. And I got imprinted, like one of Conrad Lorenz's little baby ducks who, you know, think the first big moving object they see is their parent. And The Public Theater imprinted me
11:38 Speaker 05 with the idea of what a theater should be. And it didn't really blossom in me until 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 always, but since then, is 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.
12:16 Alec Baldwin? Now, we're gonna get into the public for quite a bit in a minute, but I'll just hopscotch too. First of all, I want to ask you the difference between San Francisco and LA in terms of theater?
12:25 Speaker 05 Oh, my gosh.
12:25 Alec Baldwin? And the audience.
12:26 Speaker 05 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 up.
12:32 Alec Baldwin? Eureka.
12:33 Speaker 05 At the Eureka. I was normal in San Francisco. You know, I'd been so on the margins everywhere I'd been. Then 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 successor, the first.
12:49 Alec Baldwin? The work you were doing was important.
12:51 Speaker 05 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 Eureka Theater.
13:28 Alec Baldwin? And that was?
13:29 Speaker 05 Angels in the Back.
13:30 Alec Baldwin? Now, you were working with him?
13:31 Speaker 05 I was working with him.
13:32 Alec Baldwin? Oh, my God.
13:33 Speaker 05 I produced Tony's.
13:34 Alec Baldwin? How did you meet him?
13:35 Speaker 05 Well.
13:36 Alec Baldwin? At Eureka?
13:36 Speaker 05 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 Len Jenkin play. And I was furious because I was poor and my trips to New York were few and far between. 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 talented.
13:56 Alec Baldwin? This NYU kid?
13:57 Speaker 05 Exactly. And he's got a stage reading going on this at 8:30. Let's go see that up in Chelsea. I was like, oh, yeah, Christ, I'm gonna waste an evening on a NYU student.
14:07 Alec Baldwin? Student read through.
14:08 Speaker 05 Oh, this is a... So I go up and it was a bright room cold day. And within 20 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 Bright Room ended at that time with the actors onstage singing the international communist hymn, the Internationale. And later, I heard that backstage at intermission, the actors turned to Tony and said, "Who the fuck is singing along in the audience?" And that was me. So Tony and I met that night within a few months.
14:53 Alec Baldwin? And you never knew him?
14:54 Speaker 05 Never knew him. That's where we met. I became...
14:57 Alec Baldwin? And he was at NYU at the time?
14:58 Speaker 05 He was at NYU in the directing program. And he'd started writing plays so he'd have something to direct.
15:04 Alec Baldwin? No one would let him direct it. He'd write them to direct it.
15:08 Speaker 05 And, you know, now, about a year later, a year and a half later, I did his first professional production. I directed that play, Bright Room, called Day. And by that point, I'd commissioned Angels. We'd become the very, very close friends we were made.
15:20 Alec Baldwin? You commissioned through Mark Tabor?
15:22 Speaker 05 Through the Eureka.
15:23 Alec Baldwin? Through Eureka.
15:24 Speaker 05 And we worked on it in San Francisco until it became clear that this play was getting too big.
15:29 Alec Baldwin? Right.
15:30 Speaker 05 And the Eureka would never be able to afford it. So Gordon Davidson, who was artistic director of the Mark Tabor Forum, you know, offered me a job. And I sent him the first two acts of Angels. And I said, this was 1989, 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.
16:14 Speaker 05 He's the only man I've ever called boss. I worked for him for five years and we did Angels there.
16:18 Alec Baldwin? 1992, I'm going to the final performance of the final weekend
16:23 Speaker 05 Oh, my gosh.
16:24 Alec Baldwin? of Angels in America at the Forum.
16:26 Speaker 05 Oh, my gosh.
16:26 Alec Baldwin? And you had to walk through a gauntlet of gay men with signs that said, "I have AIDS, will you sell me your ticket?"
16:32 Speaker 05 Oh, my God.
16:33 Alec Baldwin? They thought they would die and never see the show because it had not been announced, as I recall. That wasn't as wired into the theatrical world as I
16:39 Speaker 05 No, it had not been announced.
16:40 Alec Baldwin? was, but it had not been announced that it was going to go to Broadway. So I'm going there, going, walking through this gauntlet 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 could see both parts.
16:54 Speaker 05 That's right.
16:55 Alec Baldwin? In the afternoon and the evening, the same day. They did both sections, Perestroika and
16:59 Speaker 05 Millennium approaches, the first part.
17:01 Alec Baldwin? So we see Millennium, then we see Perestroika. And you went to this restaurant, it was Jodie Foster and Michelle It's like, it's like the commissary of Warner Brothers.
17:07 Speaker 05 It was unbelievable.
17:08 Alec Baldwin? It was unbelievable, packed with movie stars.
17:10 Speaker 05 And we were kids and this just, you know, it was just unbelievable.
17:14 Alec Baldwin? So that last weekend that the show was there. When you, you know, obviously the public has a legacy where they printed a lot of money on Corusline. Corusline 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.
17:29 Speaker 05 Not exactly the same deal, but
17:31 Alec Baldwin? But good enough.
17:32 Speaker 05 Hamilton has given us a lot of support.
17:33 Alec Baldwin? Yeah, yeah, yeah. 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 develop it all yourself in-house?
17:45 Speaker 05 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 El Swent, 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-80s and we've been producing her for 45 years. We produce Serious Money with you on Broadway.
18:27 Alec Baldwin? Joe force-feeding, Joe force-feeding the Broadway world.
18:30 Speaker 05 I was, I was on opening night watching you in Serious Money. I went out with my girlfriend to, I think it was 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, Sirius Money, 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.
19:04 Alec Baldwin? Theater director Oscar Eustace. If you enjoy conversations about theater and the performing arts, check out my interview with internationally acclaimed conductor Pavlo Yerwi.
19:15 Speaker 06 I have two girls right now who, they're very talented, but they don't know, what am I gonna 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 done. It was a done deal. I wanted to be a conductor. And I never, ever wanted to be anything else, ever.
19:45 Alec Baldwin? To hear more of my conversation with Pavlo Yerwi, go to hereisthething.org. After the break, Oscar Eustace talks about the struggles facing the public theater when he first started as artistic director in 2005.
20:10 Speaker 01 Hey, it's Niall Rogers, host of Before the Moment, a Lincoln original series. I'm driving across the country, meeting some of today's most fascinating artists. We're exploring the stories before the moment that changed everything. This week, I'm joined by my friend, John Legend. What still makes you just sit down at the piano?
20:33 Speaker 07 If you sat down at 9:00 a.m. and then at noon, you had a full song that you recorded and put in your voice recorder, or you recorded at your studio. You just created something brand new that didn't exist when you woke up. What a beautiful feeling it is. I'm all... Always excited to write something new. I've been writing for Broadway, which has been a new challenge with new collaborators and amazing performers who are triple threats, who can sing and dance and act and do all these amazing things. And I want to keep feeling that. And so that means not resting on my laurels, going out there and continuing to create something new.
21:08 Speaker 01 Experience before the moment. A Lincoln original series on the iHeart Radio app, YouTube, or wherever you get your podcasts.
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22:46 Alec Baldwin? I'm Al McBaldwin, 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.
23:04 Speaker 05 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 handshake distance.
23:45 Speaker 05 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 institute.
24:27 Speaker 05 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, I 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 L.A., and I moved there when I was 30, and, you know, among other things, I thought, okay, well, film, television are in L.A., and I'll see if I want to do that. Five years in L.A., I couldn't motivate myself to walk across the room. I was in a great position, I was Associate Artistic Director of The Taper.
25:12 Speaker 05 I could have met... I just had no interest. And after five years there, I just sort of looked at my own actions and went, well, I guess I'm a theater rat. Better move back to the East Coast. And so I did. Because
25:23 Alec Baldwin? It's funny you use that phrase because we were talking in our prep, and I said, this guy's a theater rat.
25:28 Speaker 05 Absolutely.
25:29 Alec Baldwin? Theater rats, people paint 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. Your only academic, or the full time, is it your only academic appointment?
25:44 Speaker 05 Well, Trinity is, Trinity Rep Theater is a theater.
25:47 Alec Baldwin? But I mean, the fusion with Brown.
25:49 Speaker 05 Yeah, 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 it.
26:09 Alec Baldwin? What do you think about people going to degree granting, expensive degree granting universities for acting degrees? What do you think about that?
26:16 Speaker 05 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.
26:30 Alec Baldwin? Well, the issue for me, I taught a semester, a real semester with a teaching partner, one of their staff, and did this with me in 2013. So I went to Thursday afternoon for like three hours, one to four, whatever it was, with my teaching fellow. And I remember leaving there, and we did a little post mortem, 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 seat we have for Elijah at the meal. I said, because you need somebody who's, forget the cume to a degree, they can't be below a three O, they can't be below a certain SAT, but let them in as a completely skill based audition. The other kids need to see what good acting is. Because a lot
27:13 Alec Baldwin? of the people that showed up for my class, they were smart kids, they had the cumes, they had the SATs, they had everything. They just weren't that talented.
27:18 Speaker 05 Right.
27:18 Alec Baldwin? And they weren't willing to pull their pants down and take a chance. So you got a lot of bright kids, but I'm not quite sure any of them are going to be actors. And you're giving this, this is 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 who the other kids are going to see it as a model. And they just looked at me and said, thank you. You know, and they walked out.
27:44 Alec Baldwin? The college education has helped people become an actor, which make them better than they already are.
27:48 Speaker 05 Listen, I, 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 else. There's a certain set of skills, particularly in terms of verse speaking and working with your instrument, that you can't 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.
28:33 Speaker 05 And that's not what any art form needs. We need people who are genuine, it, it, it doesn't matter to me if they go to the university or not, 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?
28:52 Alec Baldwin? What's your place in it?
28:53 Speaker 05 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 autodidactor, you went to the university, I think is terribly important for young people. You gotta have something to bring to the theater, not just yourself hoping to be a star, but you gotta make yourself into a person.
29:16 Alec Baldwin? When I was in, I, I had a, 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 Damme Theater downtown, off of, off of Seventh Avenue. I did student films, corkboard at the film school, the index card, wanted, 22-year-old bartender, you know, wacky comedy. And I say to people, you just gotta keep putting it out there.
29:46 Speaker 05 That's right.
29:47 Alec Baldwin? If you stay home and just do readings.
29:50 Alec Baldwin? I have a lot of friends where 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.
29:56 Speaker 05 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 my, 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.
30:37 Speaker 05 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, who's somebody who could, you know, sort of could fade into the woodwork? You're interested in-
30:51 Alec Baldwin? They're not very anything.
30:52 Speaker 05 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 individuality, that specificity of self, is one of the reasons I love the theater so much.
31:14 Alec Baldwin? Now, when you leave Trinity and you come to the big town here in 2005, you come here, and what's the financial condition of the place? Because I'm always looking at everybody, after this film festival, everybody I work with, what's the financial condition and what they're inheriting?
31:27 Speaker 05 Well, you know, it wasn't great. The public had been through a really sort of calamitous reduction in the early 2000s after 9/11. We were stable, but we were down to about a $12 million 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 fact, our spaces were empty a lot. And when I arrived, this was the sign 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 dilemma.
32:11 Speaker 05 And I'm very glad to say we turned that around pretty quickly.
32:14 Alec Baldwin? Why doesn't the public have a Broadway house?
32:17 Speaker 05 Because.
32:17 Alec Baldwin? Sure you thought about it?
32:18 Speaker 05 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'd 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 300 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
33:00 Speaker 05 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 99-seat theater. We move it to our biggest theater. We move it to Broadway.
33:17 Alec Baldwin? The biggest one is what? Which one now?
33:19 Speaker 05 The Newman, 300 seats.
33:20 Alec Baldwin? How much is the Luester?
33:22 Speaker 05 The Luester's 175 seats.
33:23 Alec Baldwin? That's why I did Scottish play.
33:24 Speaker 05 Yeah, yeah, that's right. It's a great, it's a great poster, too. But Fun Home ends up winning the Tony Award for Best Play. Hamilton, I mean, you, 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 hit, they're not based on a movie title. It turns out to be a better way of making commercial successes than aiming for commercial success.
33:55 Alec Baldwin? That's funny you said that about the description you had of the character. I remember saying to George back in 98 when we did the play, I said, you know, the emblem of the public theater is like a, you know, a black transgender woman in a wheelchair who's 80 years old is like the lead character. And Wolf was sitting there, he's 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, like, we, we do whatever. We do whatever we feel is a great storytelling. But, but the public does have an emblem. The public has a hood ornament of all this diversity and all this inclusivity. And is it tough to maintain that? What if material that is the DNA you crave in that area, that's, that's really open minded that way, but it's just not very good?
34:37 Speaker 05 Never been a problem.
34:38 Alec Baldwin? Never, that's what I'm saying, never been a problem. Great submissions.
34:41 Speaker 05 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, I'll give you a beautiful example of this. When I arrived at the theater, one of the things I said is, okay, we get a thousand plus submissions a year from playwrights. 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 have 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 programs in universities.
35:23 Speaker 05 So let's form a group that's just those people, that people without MFAs, without agents, without productions. And, you know, just to make it easy, we'll pay them to be in this group rather than charge them. So we formed the Emerging Writers Group, which was, is now 18, 19 years old, and has been extraordinarily successful. Brandon Jacob Jenkins came out of that group. Dominique Morisso, Mona Mansour, I could keep going and going. Else Went, who I just mentioned, that will premiere next year, came out of that group. And when you start working with writers that early in their careers, when you start supporting them, the work comes. And not just out of the EWG group, but just, you form the relationships.
36:06 Speaker 05 There is no problem with our work being incredibly diverse. There's no problem with really high quality work being incredibly diverse. You just have to go out and develop the relationships with the artists who make that work.
36:19 Alec Baldwin? 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. This is something Juilliard, 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, is it like that now? Do you think that generations of actors now who are succeeding in film and television feel the pull to come back to the not-for-profit theater? I'm not talking about Broadway, they might get a paycheck.
36:47 Speaker 05 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, and none 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're plucking them right at the beginning of our careers, whether it's playwrights 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,
37:32 Speaker 05 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 just finished your training. You go out, you do Shakespeare in the Park a couple of times. You understudy a lead. You play a supporting character. Then maybe 10 years later, you can come back and do it again. But if you don't get that grounding right at the beginning of your career, it's hard. Same with writers. Young playwrights, 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 when you're older. So a lot of what...
38:12 Speaker 05 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've got to also have a home in the theater. You've got to know that that's a place you can return to. And so you take a writer like Susan Laurie Parks, who we've given, we've given her a salary for the last 15 years. She's got a salary and healthcare and benefits. And you know what her duties are? To write plays. Not even write plays for us, just to write plays. And it was sort of an experiment.
38:53 Speaker 05 What happens to a master writer in her early 50s when you actually give her a chair at the theater?
39:03 Alec Baldwin? Give her a relationship with a handful of people?
39:04 Speaker 05 Uh, Susan Laurie's the only one we have that full relationship with. We're working to get more. Well, what happens is she keeps turning out great plays.
39:12 Alec Baldwin? Top Dog, Underdog, my favorite.
39:14 Speaker 05 Yeah, amazing. But, you know, Father Comes Home From The Wars is fantastic. The Play Gear plays that she just did, Sally and Tom, her play about Sally Hemings and Tom Jefferson, just a year and a half ago, was wonderful. And that's not been the norm. American playwrights don't keep producing great work into their 50s and 60s. 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.
39:48 Alec Baldwin? Theater director Oscar Eustace. If you're enjoying this conversation, tell a friend and be sure to follow Here's the Thing on the iHeart Radio app, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts. When we come back, Oscar Eustace shares why he is passionate about uplifting new voices in playwriting.
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40:43 Speaker 07 I was just writing for the Black Eyed Peas. I wasn't expecting to write something for myself in that session, but I wrote the hook for "Ordinary People," and I recorded a demo, and I'm like, I would rather keep "Ordinary People" for myself. This station in Chicago, WCCI, they start playing it before we're promoting it. The song spoke for itself. It became the defining song for my first album. I knew it was special, but you never know how special it's going to be and how much impact it's going to have in people's lives. And you never believe that you're going to actually change people's lives with a song.
41:13 Speaker 01 Experience Before the Moment, a Lincoln original series on the iHeartRadio app, YouTube, or wherever you get your podcasts.
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42:51 Alec Baldwin? I'm Alec Baldwin and this is Here's the Thing. The Public Theater was founded by Joseph Papp in 1954 and originated as a Shakespeare workshop. Since then, the Public Theater continues its tradition of staging productions like their free Shakespeare in the Park or 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.
43:21 Speaker 05 Heck, no.
43:23 Alec Baldwin? Now, are there some years you don't do any or do you always represent him?
43:26 Speaker 05 Oh, no, no, no. We always have to do Shakespeare. And here's that when I say have to, I mean for mission purposes. And there's two reasons. One is he is the greatest playwright who ever wrote in the English language. So he's a stunning role model for every other playwright we do. We see, hold him up and go, this is what playwriting at its greatest can be and aspire to be that big, aspire to combine what Shakespeare combines. But it's also true that in addition to being the greatest writer in the history of the planet, the English-speaking peoples conquered the world.
44:03 Speaker 05 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.
44:21 Speaker 05 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 races and ethnicities in New York City. And that, to me, is a huge pillar of how we democratize our culture.
45:00 Alec Baldwin? Perhaps you're familiar with my friend Dan Wexler, who's an antiquarian book, you know Dan?
45:04 Speaker 05 I do.
45:04 Alec Baldwin? Dan Wexler, who's an antiquarian book dealer, I'll say this for my listeners. And I met Dan, who he and his partner in this antiquarian book company, they came upon a book that they recognized. It was probably undervalued, not a very significant number of thousands of dollars. They bought his copy of Barret's Alvieri. You're familiar with Barret's Alvieri? So this book, which was a writing book, a 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 Barret's Alvieri."
45:39 Speaker 05 Crazy.
45:40 Alec Baldwin? And everybody around the world, Folger, Oxford, all over the world, they go, "You get someone else to say it is, and I'll concur, but I'm not going to say it is. I'm sticking my neck out, because if I'm wrong..."
45:49 Speaker 05 Right.
45:50 Alec Baldwin? "...then I'm..." And they think they got his copy, of his notes in there, things you can't imagine.
45:56 Speaker 05 Well, just to say, you know, that that leads my mind to the whole Shakespeare controversy, that there's this strain, which I'm sure many of your listeners have heard, of people who, for the last 200 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 19th 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.
46:40 Speaker 05 And you'll find in all of the, you know, the Earl of Oxford, in 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 Tanner's son with a 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 reestablish the very kind of class distinctions that we're devoted to tearing down.
47:11 Alec Baldwin? If people want to submit, do people submit plays to you?
47:15 Speaker 05 Yeah, they do.
47:16 Alec Baldwin? And then you must be, you must have a lot of submissions.
47:18 Speaker 05 Yeah, we, we ask people to send a synopsis and a sample because we simply don't have the manpower, person power to read everything.
47:28 Alec Baldwin? Send me a synopsis of your movie.
47:29 Speaker 05 So, you know, if we are intrigued, we then request the full script.
47:34 Alec Baldwin? Have you found any pieces you like that you've done for that?
47:37 Speaker 05 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 blam, and it did happen a few years ago with a wonderful writer named Sarah Burgess, who I 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 Cale directed it, and Hank Kazaria, and John Krasinski, and Claire Danes were, and Sanja de Silva, it was a fantastic cast, amazing. And, you know, she turned out to have just studied Wall Street.
48:22 Speaker 05 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.
48:31 Alec Baldwin? People respond to both of the plays?
48:33 Speaker 05 Oh, yeah, oh, yeah. 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.
48:40 Alec Baldwin? What are you working on now?
48:42 Speaker 05 Well, um.
48:43 Alec Baldwin? What's coming up this summer, you can't say? You don't know?
48:45 Speaker 05 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.
49:03 Alec Baldwin? Onstage.
49:04 Speaker 05 Onstage, they're going to do what they want.
49:07 Alec Baldwin? Right.
49:07 Speaker 05 But we need them to not be backstage.
49:09 Alec Baldwin? Yes.
49:10 Speaker 05 So, we're going to reopen with a production of Twelfth Night that Sahim Ali, my associate artistic director, is directing. I couldn't be more excited about it. We've got a great cast of public theater veterans. Lapita Nyango, Sandra Oh, Jesse Tyler Ferguson, Peter Dinklage, Daphne Ruben Vega. I mean, it's an embarrassment, Bill Camp.
49:29 Alec Baldwin? I love Bill.
49:30 Speaker 05 It's an embarrassment of riches.
49:31 Alec Baldwin? I love Bill and his wife.
49:32 Speaker 05 Oh, Elizabeth.
49:33 Alec Baldwin? I saw her on the street the other day.
49:35 Speaker 05 Yeah.
49:35 Alec Baldwin? So, you're going to do that. So, one Shakespeare and then one TBD?
49:38 Speaker 05 No, we're actually only doing one because we were worried about construction getting behind. So, one that's going to start performing in the first week of August and then next summer, the summer of '26.
49:48 Alec Baldwin? Two shows.
49:48 Speaker 05 Yeah, well, to the, in 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 co-production with Magi 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.
50:20 Alec Baldwin? This play, Sumo.
50:21 Speaker 05 Yeah, it's really.
50:22 Alec Baldwin? I just want to say the most exciting and interesting, Here Lies Love.
50:26 Speaker 05 Oh.
50:27 Alec Baldwin? I want all the, I want it odd. I want it different. I want something I can't see, you know where. And I loved Here Lies Love. I love everything when I come there, when I have the time. You can't leave. You know that, right?
50:37 Speaker 05 Well, I'm not going to leave for a while.
50:39 Alec Baldwin? Don't leave for a while, for a while.
50:40 Speaker 05 And I'll make sure the theater's in very good hands when I do.
50:47 Alec Baldwin? 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 McNeese, and Victoria DeMartin. 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.
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