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BONUS: The Playwright Who Just Won the Tony Awards · Uncomfortable Conversations with Josh Szeps

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  G'day, humans! Welcome to The Safe Space for Dangerous Ideas, and we have a little treat
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  for you today, a bonus episode, because over the weekend, the Tony Awards were held in New
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  York City, Broadway's Night of Nights, The Oscars for plays, and the winner of the Tony
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  Award for Best Revival of a Play was an audacious, hilarious play about cancel culture and social
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  justice and identity politics, called Eureka Day. I had the pleasure of sitting down with
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  the playwright a few days before the Tony win. He's based in Oakland, California, and the
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  play is set at a very woke private school in Berkeley, California, and follows the parents
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  and teachers as they wrestle with vaccine mandates. Quite interestingly, the play was written
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  in 2018, 2017, 2018. It first appeared off Broadway, and then at London's Old Vic and
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  Return to Broadway, into the craziness of COVID vaccines, and new conversations about
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  mandates and sort of peak wokeness, and it's now more relevant than ever. I spoke with
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  the playwright about all that and more. I hope you enjoy this little taste of the one
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  and only Jonathan Specter. I was fascinated after I read the script to realise that it was
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  written in 2017. Is that right? Yeah, I think I started working on it in late 2016, and
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  yeah, I sort of had it finished in 2017, and then it had its first production in 2018.
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  I mean, you are ahead of your time. It feels very post-2022. Yes, I mean, what's strange
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  is it, I mean, the vaccine conversation, yes, although it sort of changed so much because
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  of COVID, the part that feels eerily out of the time and away now is the, you know, what
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  people call the sort of Zoom conversation scene. Although, when I first wrote it at the
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  time, the technology in the play they were referencing was Facebook Live, which is what
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  do you think? No, exactly. Yeah, my space or like Google, or something. But I don't, I'm
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  not, I don't even mean the web chat stuff or necessarily the vaccine stuff, but the, the
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  fact of the existence, I mean, I suppose you're close to it because you live in Northern
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  California, but the existence of a dominant elite who are obsessed with social justice
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  cues amongst themselves and with virtue signaling to each other about how they're on the,
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  on the right side of social justice, that rhetoric, I feel like we've reached a point
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  at which I'm going to be interested in seeing how creatives wrestle with this moment now
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  that we seem to have sort of tailed off the end of the, the, the most intense version
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  of that perhaps at the beginning of the decade during the pandemic. And so to then learn that
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  this came about before George Floyd, before the racial reckoning, before, uh, Trump
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  he didn't, is, uh, I don't know, you, you're like a suitsayer in that regard. Yeah, I
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  don't know. I mean, I don't know if this spreads beyond the states, you know, there's sort
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  of a cliche that everything kind of starts in California and then sort of spreads across
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  the country. Um, and I think, yeah, I mean, this, you know, way of, of, of approaching things,
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  you know, what, what, you know, it was quite common, I think for some time and certainly
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  and, and so you're Berkeley and Northern California and there's more lefty progressive
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  circles. So it didn't, I mean, the way it was just shifted, I think, is that both when
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  it was first done in California and then when it had a few other productions before COVID,
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  I think people didn't have as many feelings about this kind of, you know, mode of operating,
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  you know, it's just sort of like, well, this is how those people in Berkeley, California,
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  do things. It's a, you know, we might think it's a little silly, but, you know, I think
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  people take it seriously and it is a serious attempt to sort of find the most, um, thoughtful
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  and, and kind of, um, hair taking way of, of engaging with this stuff. And I think for
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  me that, you know, what the play is about in our current moment is more that it's kind
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  of a snapshot of like this moment in time and a little bit of a document of like how
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  we got here and the way in which this way of engagement, you know, worked really, really
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  well for this group of people for a very long time until it encountered something that
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  it, it wasn't sort of up to the task of dealing with. And I think, you know, similarly
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  that is, is, uh, much of what we on the left, you know, did in the past eight years from
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  2016. I think there's a lot of things you can say about it, but the one thing that's
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  pretty clear is whatever we were doing didn't work because, um, you know, I think obviously
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  people have a lot of different opinions about exactly, you know, what, what was done wrong
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  and why, um, but what was your point of view at the time when you were writing it that
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  this is a cohort of the left that is a dead end and that why should satirize as part
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  of a no, no, no, no, I mean, it wasn't, I didn't really even think of it. And I still
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  don't think of it as a, as a satire, um, in the sense that like nothing in the play is
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  in any way exaggerated. That says a lot about Berkeley. I mean, the first, to an outside
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  of the first 30 or 40 pages is, is, is an intense satire of a certain social justice way of
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  speaking where you're incredibly performative about the respect and inclusion that you're
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  trying to bring to the conversation, that the expense of actually saying anything worthwhile,
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  whatsoever. People tripping over themselves to, to try to demonstrate to each other that
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  each of them is more committed to inclusion, uh, than the other is. But that may just be the
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  world that you grew up in. Yeah, I think it's some combination of, you know, yeah, again,
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  in, in 2018, when it was first done in Berkeley, because it was a commission from a theater in
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  Berkeley, it was certainly received as sort of a comedy, but not a sort of, in any way, a kind of
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  exaggeration of how people behave. I think it was much more like, well, yeah, this is, this is how
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  people are, you know, people that we know and ourselves as well. Um, so it wasn't, you know,
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  maybe that's particular for the place and also just kind of the way this way of engaging with
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  things has kind of, um, moved through the culture, you know, within in the past six years and,
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  and kind of become a different thing. And, and now it, you know, I mean, I can, I can see why people
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  then receive it that way. Um, but I think it, yeah, it both has to do with the specificity and with,
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  you know, there's a lot of sort of meaning now that people hold behind this, this way of being on,
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  on the left that I think people just didn't ascribe to it in, you know, 2018. Didn't describe
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  it to what? I mean, to this, this sort of, you know, the sort of intense focus on like kind of
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  using the right kind of language to try and talk about everything in a way that's going to make
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  everyone feel included, um, which is obviously like, you know, a, a, a nice thing to do for people
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  if you're in a room, where you want people to feel respected, but it may have felt to other people
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  outside of Berkeley at the time, like, oh, this is a little bit, this is a little bit much, but it
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  didn't, I think now in the US because we're still reeling and suffering the consequences of
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  Trump's re-election. There's much more of a feeling of like, did we, uh, you know, sort of what,
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  were we missing in, in sort of as this way of engaging sort of, I think, mood from being particular
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  to sort of Northern California to sort of very specific pockets communities to being kind of,
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  I think, more broadly embraced by kind of liberals and left and, and then I think there's something
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  of a retreat from that now. Yeah, I mean, I, I wonder whether or not the response to the reactions
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  to it have changed since Trump, and I'll be interested to see what the reaction is abroad in
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  places like Sydney as well, where I think the, this kind of discourse will be familiar to
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  audiences from academia and from maybe certain cliques in elite media and so on, but is by
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  no means the widespread way that the left talks to itself in, in other central left countries outside
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  of California, right? I mean, there's still, there's still much more focused on bread and butter,
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  economic issues than they are on proving that they're using the correct, you know, pronoun.
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  But now that, yeah, sorry, if you jump in. Oh, no, as we say, we did, it had a production in London
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  a couple years ago, and it was a similar, I mean, it was very interesting that both the critics,
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  I mean, both the critics who really loved it and the ones who loved it less, they all sort of
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  agreed that this was this sort of wild exaggeration and that nobody really acts this way in real life,
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  which was not, you'll like come to Berkeley. Yeah, that was interesting.
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  The other thing that has shifted just also, you know, prior to COVID, I think people knew, you know,
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  had feelings about vaccines and about people who didn't vaccinate their kids, but really,
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  unless like you happen to be in that phase of your life where you were like thinking about that a
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  lot, it just wasn't something that most people spend a lot of time thinking about or had a lot of
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  really intense feelings about, and now, you know, everyone has a lot of intense feelings about it,
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  and it's a lot of, at least, you know, I mean, I don't know exactly how things went down in Australia
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  in terms of vaccine mandates, and you know, but there's obviously it became a real cultural
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  touch point and became a very, became very politicized. Yes, and I mean, it's interesting,
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  what is interesting about the play now in a post pandemic is that you had picked an
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  issue on which the supposed, the sort of irrational side of things was closely associated with the
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  fruity granola crunchy left, but has now also become a right wing thing during the pandemic.
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  So it's got this double violence in a way that it's got a political horseshoe to it, the anti-vax
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  movement specifically. Yeah, I mean, there's definitely a, you know, a cohort of people, I think,
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  who, in COVID, you know, began on the sort of crunchy left wellness vector and sort of went all
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  the way around to, you know, like Robert F. Kennedy, I mean, they just fully down the conspiracy
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  theory rabbit hole. Naomi Wolf. Yeah, exactly, but I think there are always, prior to COVID, there were
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  always, you know, vaccine skeptics on the right and on the left and kind of it just, they sort of
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  had slightly different reasons for that, but that's what made it interesting as an idea to me,
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  to explore and a play because you could have a subject that could be intensely contentious,
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  but was not inherently political at that time. Like it didn't, you know, knowing somebody
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  who didn't have actually, their kids didn't necessarily tell you what their politics were, then
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  and now it mostly does. And so that's just been like a huge deal. Well, I'm not sure that's true in
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  Australia. I would say that there's, there's probably more of still the left wing cohort of
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  anti-vaxxers than a right wing phenomenon. It would still mostly be the holistic, you know,
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  mother earth guy, I got S people who are not vaccinating in Australia versus. Yeah, I mean,
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  I think something that happened in the US, I mean, obviously like it's hard to speak about
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  everybody, but I think some of those people who had that attitude and who were, became sort of
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  anti-vaxxers, they then drifted all the way to Trump. Yeah. And then I think other people who
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  were on the left who maybe leaned that way. And maybe we're a little hesitant about vaccines
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  because it became so politicized and so associated with the sort of Trump people and the right wing
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  conspiracy, there is they then moved more the other way on sort of, yeah, I think there's just this
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  way in which it sort of scrambled everything. I mean, I'm one thing I'm interested about is whether
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  or not the play in 2025 will code as right wing for anybody. You know what I mean? Like when you
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  wrote it, it was obviously not. And now it is a satire. I can imagine people saying, I can
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  imagine right wingers, you know, on our equivalent of Fox News here saying like at last someone's
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  sticking it to the woke, you know, crazies. And I can imagine lefties feeling like seriously,
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  at a moment of Trump and Elon and the rise of the far right, the populist right all over the world,
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  we really need to be poking fun, you know, shooting fish in a barrel by making fun of the left when
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  we are on the right side of, you know, when we're fighting for people's rights. Have you noticed
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  a change in violence? Yeah, I mean, I think again, like it's interesting. I don't think that was
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  really the response most people had when it was on Broadway earlier this year. I think that people,
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  some people did have that response in London. And so I think it is a bit about how this stuff is sort
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  of interpreted culturally like through the lens of what they think of sort of Americans. But I
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  think, you know, there is a lot of humor. But, you know, ultimately, it's still people, I think
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  earnestly trying to like figure out what the right thing is to do in this situation, you know,
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  that sort of lives in line with their values. And I think, you know, none of them I think are in
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  the end like ridiculous people at the end of the play. They're all sort of the opposite. They're all
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  quite struggling with like sort of trying to figure out how you navigate this kind of very
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  difficult situation. Your balance, you know, what is fundamentally like the rights of the individual
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  and the, you know, what's good for the community. And that sort of that's true. But I mean, the
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  play does have, and the play is very funny. I should emphasize, but it does have, it's not just
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  about the conflict between the individual and the community. It's also, it has an epistemological
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  point to make, I think, about how we should come to conclusions about how we ought to live in the
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  sense that, you know, there's this is an issue on which science is quite clear. And so the individual's
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  right to be irrational is what is sort of salient. Like there's a great moment where they're talking
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  about what values the community has that they want to write up on a on a whiteboard or a giant
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  poster note and respect is one of them. And I think Suzanne says that, you know, by respect, we
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  mean respecting everybody's ideas and never making anybody wrong for believing anything.
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  And they're about to write up respect. And one of the carriers is like, hang on, I'm not sure
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  that actually is what I mean by respect necessarily, to respect whatever it is that you believe.
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  Like the moon is made of cheese, she says, you know, we don't respect that equally to some other
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  claim, which I think is is foundational to the collapse of conversation in the 21st century.
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  Like how much respect should we give to bad ideas? Right. And how do you navigate your way through
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  these sort of competing values that you have? And I mean, that was a big, you know, a big part
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  of the, also the thing that I had a bit of an impact on the writing of the play early on was
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  because it was right up to in the right before the 2016 election. And I, and I think a lot of
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  people I knew were sort of confronting in a way I never really had just how many people seem to
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  live in a totally different reality than I did. Like there was this one moment, it was, you know,
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  right when I was sort of in the middle of trying to write a first draft, it's very landed for me
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  heavily, where I was at the, I was like, you know, getting my car tuned up, I was picking it up
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  from the car shop and the other body shop and I'm the guy at the counter is kind of checking me out.
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  And there's another counter, a woman's talking to the guy who's working there and they're talking
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  about whatever insane thing Trump had just done or said that day. And I sort of joined in their
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  conversation where I'll talking about it. And then the guy who's standing there, you know, processing my
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  car says, yeah, well, you know, Trump isn't great, but Hillary Clinton murdered 27 people. So what are
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  you going to do? And excuse me, like, what are you? We're not in Berkeley anymore, Toto.
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  And you know, as we sort of asked him, how do you think this? Where do you get this information?
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  And he's like, oh, I'm not political. My wife watches a lot of YouTube, you know, and I think
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  that for me was such a sort of perception shift in terms of just how deep it went that we were
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  living in these like epistemological bubbles and separate realities. And then what do you do with
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  that? And certainly in terms of like the metaphor of the play of like, how do you make a society?
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  How do you make a democracy with people? If you can't agree on any kind of like baseline truth.
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  And I think it is a challenge that if anything that, you know, in terms of like the prescience of
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  the play, that as like a problem we were facing in society has, you know, gotten so much worse than
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  I think you both imagined, you know, over the past eight years.
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  Yeah, what is your current state of the union? Like, well, how have things gone from the perspective
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  of a liberal pliaride in Berkeley? I mean, is terrifying, you know, I think it's a question of,
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  you know, just are we? Are we going to make it? Are we going to make it through this time?
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  And what is making it through and not making it through the client?
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  Oh, I mean, I think making it through means we get to the end of Trump's term and we have an
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  election and we are able to, you know, return to and sort of preserve the structures of a democracy
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  in this country and not making it through as we sort of slide into a kind of, you know, soft
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  authoritarianism, like you, you know, as all these various countries like Brazil or Turkey or
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  Hungary where they have kind of moved from being democracies into, you know, what are they?
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  What's the phrase people competitive, competitive authoritarianism?
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  Yeah, some days different phrase, but yeah, some days they say something like, how will you know,
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  will the Republican Party have to return to a kind of George H.W. Bush like conservatism or like
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  if the Republican Party continues to be a populous party and the next succession of candidates
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  are Don Jr. and JD Vance, then does that still qualify as having made it through?
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  I don't know. I think it depends on, you know, what other of the sort of structures and
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  democracies stay in place. I mean, I think I think no one knows what comes after Trump for the
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  Republicans because the party has become such a cult of personality that nobody around him really
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  seems to be able to replicate. And so I, it's just very hard to see which direction it goes.
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  No, but there are analogs that can give clues like the French far right or Nigel Farage in the UK
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  or Tucker Carlson on TV, right? You know, like people who are able to articulate a similar
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  vision of American populism. It's true, but all of the, in all of the sort of Senate congressional
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  gubernatorial elections, all the candidates who've tried to kind of imitate him have not been
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  very successful. Not. So I don't know. I mean, there's some weird combination of his celebrity
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  and that he was kind of this, you know, people knew him as this like very successful businessman
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  for 40, 50 years in popular culture, even though it was sort of all facade. And so there's
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  something with that. And also his like rather unique ability to lie in a way that people I think
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  are not capable of. No, that's true, but I, but you don't need a, you don't need a facsimile
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  of the guy, right? I mean, I think the problem with with gubernatorial candidates who've tried
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  to be Trumpi is that they're trying, you know, they're trying to replicate his shamelessness,
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  his demagoguery. You can't try to be Trump, but not Trump. But you can articulate a vision of
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  the right that is xenophobic, pro-medicare, completely reckless with finances,
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  making it rain cash for good hardworking white Americans, supposedly, like that can be the mindset
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  and a return to a better era when men will man and, you know, always wearing dresses.
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  Yeah, I don't know. I mean, it's, I mean, I think probably a lot depends on what happens
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  economically over the next couple of years too, which seems almost certain to go in a very, very bad
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  direction. But of course, you know, one never knows, but I think that that is probably a very big
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  determining factor in how this all plays out as well. But I think the challenge is, you know,
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  they've done so much destruction just in this first five and a half months, five months,
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  that even if the Democrats were to sort of regain the White House or gain Congress, they can't
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  just sort of pick up, you know, where things had left off in 2024. They, you know, so much of
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  the apparatus and the bureaucracy of government has been gutted. You sort of have to come up with some
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  new vision of what the country is going to be from here that is also, I mean, the Democrats,
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  own vision has been so thoroughly repudiated that it would be, it would be surely full-hardy to try
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  to say, let's just pretend that none of this happened and continue on as if it was hard. The
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  challenges is like, I don't know who can even say what that vision is, you know, I think that's
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  part of that was part of their problem. So yeah, I mean, somebody is going to have to come along
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  who can articulate a new path forward. But I don't know. I mean, I, I vacillate day to day on like
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  how optimistic I am about sort of the country surviving in some recognizable form and or whether
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  they will, you know, sort of collapse under the weight of their sort of incompetence and corruption.
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  Something I read early on that I've kind of been clinging to, you know, for as a life raft is that,
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  you know, when you look at all of these other countries where they kind of
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  transformed themselves from a democracy to a sort of dictatorship with the apparatus of a
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  democracy, the people who did that all were enormously popular when they came in and they stayed
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  popular for a while and they actually really did improve the economy for people. So they, you know,
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  they had 75 80% approval ratings for a while, which allowed them to kind of then really, you know,
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  change the constitution, you know, nobody has done it when they're, you know, underwater out of the
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  gate, you know, which he pretty much has been and and even in those other places, it still took a
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  long time. It still took 10 years to sort of complete it. So that's the thing that I hold.
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  Hope is that like he's he is unpopular and he's not
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  materially making anyone's lives better and, you know, has not yet and has no plan to do so.
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  So that's sort of that's the hope. Yeah, no, I think that's I think that's valid.
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  It's what's worse for all of us. Yeah. Yeah. No, no, the political scientist Yasha Monk was on the show
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  last recently, a couple of weeks ago and was making that point that, you know, they're all,
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  all of these would be autocrats are very popular. It takes them a very long time. And also,
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  they do it in countries that haven't been stable democracies for centuries. Right. You know,
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  it's usually countries that have only had democracy for a few decades. So if I were a betting man,
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  I think you're going to be okay. Yeah, it's very, also a very large country that's very sort of
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  decentralized and it's overlapping layers of government between, so it just it makes it, I think,
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  tricky to do very quickly. Yeah. As you're seeing the courts doing overall a pretty good job
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  of standing up because again, even if the Supreme Court is not very reliable, there's so many other
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  judges and courts spread all across the country. And it just, you know, it would take, it would take
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  a decade or longer to kind of replace all of those judges. Yeah. And it reminds to be saying whether
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  or not it's true that the Supreme Court is unreliable about, you know, upholding American democracy.
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  They're unreliable in achieving the ends of liberal Americans, but they haven't yet been tested
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  with, you know, a genuine confrontation about whether or not Americans can be hauled off the streets
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  and sent to El Salvador or whatever it might. Yes. Although I would like to think, John Roberts is
• 23:37
  having at least a little bit of regret over saying the president has total immunity for everything.
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  Well, again, you know, like history as long, isn't it? So it depends on who's in power. And you
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  can also imagine, you know, Republicans charging a Democratic president with all kinds of frivolous
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  lawsuits if there wasn't an immunity. So you can imagine the John Roberts perspective as being a
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  precautionary one rather than a partisan one, if one is maximum generous. I think a lot of people
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  sort of deluded themselves and including them that if Trump was reelected that he would not,
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  that he would just be sort of a version of what he was the first time, rather than someone who
• 24:14
  was so much more unleashed and unhinged and had no constraints on his action. Yeah. He has been
• 24:20
  that let's not let's not look forward and instead look back. What did what have the Democrats
• 24:25
  gotten wrong? Then since since you wrote this way, like what why you just said they don't have a
• 24:30
  vision. It's hard to articulate the vision, right? Like what were they standing for in 2020 in 2024?
• 24:36
  How did that? I think it's well, I think 2020 was a little clearer because it was very much just
• 24:41
  not Trump and as well as the, you know, that was that was the first year of COVID and so there's
• 24:46
  also this feeling of like this had been so mismanaged and so it was just a return to normalcy
• 24:53
  and competency which, you know, was a successful enough campaign message at that moment. But then
• 24:59
  after that, I mean, of course, a lot of it had to do then having a president who was kind of
• 25:04
  incapable of doing at least the part of the job that involved like communicating anything with the
• 25:10
  the thinking, the the thinking and being alive. So that I mean, and then and yeah, I think that sort
• 25:17
  of then there was a paralysis because the person who's the, you know, titular head of the party who's
• 25:22
  meant to be articulating the vision for the party is absent and saying that nobody else can really
• 25:27
  step forward while Biden's president and say here is the vision which you're all going to follow.
• 25:31
  And so I think now they, you know, I think there are a couple of sort of competing ideas, but I don't
• 25:38
  think they yet have landed on kind of what that is, but I also feel like in terms of the presidency,
• 25:44
  like the people a year into the term who think they know what's going to be the winning
• 25:50
  message three years from now or never right. It's always something else. That's true. Yeah, yeah,
• 25:54
  exactly. Yeah, yeah. And the moment will be in such a different moment in time then. So it'll
• 25:59
  probably be very responsive to whatever is, you know, whatever disasters are facing. Like it,
• 26:04
  you know, I imagine that will dictate the power. No, that's right. I mean, I always have to reassure
• 26:10
  myself about the democratic party being in the dog rooms by thinking reminding myself that we are
• 26:16
  now at the same point in the Obama cycle as 2005 right after John Kerry lost when everybody just
• 26:23
  thought like there was no hope and that the, you know, what is the democratic party going to be?
• 26:29
  I guess we're going to have to find another version of John Kerry and the idea that an Obama
• 26:33
  existed was as far from anybody's minds as, well, I mean, some people have noticed his speech
• 26:38
  of the year before, but you know, like three years is a long time in politics. Or in the, I mean,
• 26:43
  in the darker vision of it, the idea that like right after Obama's reelection in 2012 that
• 26:49
  anybody would say Donald Trump is going to be the Republic, you know, going to win the Republican
• 26:53
  primary and I think it's just very hard to know how these things play out. And I mean, I think
• 26:59
  there's no question like there is a sense in which the, you know, central apparatus of the
• 27:04
  democratic party feels like it's a bit seems to be caught a bit too much kind of just talking to
• 27:11
  itself and not always able to, you know, have a good clear message that it can communicate effectively
• 27:18
  to the public or caught in a previous era where they're still very concerned about sort of what's
• 27:23
  being said on cable news, even though nobody watches cable news and are sort of certainly behind
• 27:28
  the Republicans in terms of, you know, all the podcasts and social media and all the, all the
• 27:34
  all the ways in which people are getting information now, which is not the newspaper or cable
• 27:38
  news. That's true. But I mean, they're also caught behind rhetorically in the in ways that you
• 27:42
  satirize in your play, even if you don't insist on, even if you insist on claiming that it wasn't
• 27:48
  the satire. In the sense that there's a, they still haven't been able to escape the conversational
• 27:56
  sense that they need to be very careful and tread on egg shells and not trigger tripwires that
• 28:01
  are going to wail in a particular activist points of view or that could be seen to be punching
• 28:06
  down on traditionally marginalized communities and so on, rather than speaking sort of
• 28:11
  fearlessly in an obviously bullshit free way to the heartland about things. Yeah, I mean, I think
• 28:17
  it's it's also a quality of feeling like you're a real person who's speaking authentically
• 28:23
  as much as what you're saying. Like I think, you know, AOC, whether or not she will, you know,
• 28:28
  could win a national race is one of the most talented politicians. And when you hear her speak,
• 28:34
  you just feel like this is a real person talking to me in a very straightforward way. It's very
• 28:39
  easy to understand what she's talking about in a way that a lot of politicians, I mean, the
• 28:43
  Democrats, maybe even more than Republicans, the Republicans are sort of crazy in a different way,
• 28:47
  but like they just feel like they get caught in this politician speak where they become very careful
• 28:53
  about how they see it. And I think that is a quality that may have again been very effective
• 28:59
  like in the 90s when it was, you know, what mattered is is your sort of three minute cable news hit
• 29:05
  and so you had to get just the right words out. But I think right now people are responding more
• 29:09
  to people who feel whether it's real or not a feeling of authenticity. Yeah, yeah, of course,
• 29:15
  big into them, which is why, you know, like the popularity of Bernie in part is just that like
• 29:23
  no one questions whether this guy like means what he says because he's been saying the same thing
• 29:27
  50 years. Yeah, but I mean, I think it's more than that they're locked in an old vision of the
• 29:32
  three minute cable news sound by being important. It's that they care a lot more than
• 29:38
  the Trump wing of the Republican party does about whether or not they're going to say the wrong thing.
• 29:43
  Like they're obeying a lot of rules. And even IOC, even though she has an era of authenticity,
• 29:49
  when she's suddenly talking about BIPOC people and, you know, talking about Latin X people
• 29:55
  or something or using jargon that is obviously not the way that she would talk within the privacy
• 30:00
  of her own home. I still think it still it sounds phony to people. And the refusal to go on podcasts
• 30:07
  and stuff like that from mainstream Democrats is less that they think that there's great upside
• 30:12
  in not going on the podcast. It's more that they're terrified of the downside of saying something
• 30:16
  that's going to alienate some particular. Yeah, I mean, I think that was particularly to Kamala Harris
• 30:22
  who and particularly in inheriting the Biden team who were so terrified that to put him in front
• 30:29
  of any situation where he was going to say anything. Yeah. And so then they had that same caution
• 30:35
  for her of yeah, being much more afraid to get something wrong rather than just sort of getting
• 30:41
  out there a lot. And even in that image, I don't know if you saw the, you know, the absurd Trump lawsuit
• 30:46
  about like her 60 minute interviews. So they like, you know, put out the unedited footage and you
• 30:51
  saw her before the cameras were really rolling just talking to the interviewer and she just
• 30:57
  is talking like a real person and you're like, oh, she's so interesting in charting. And
• 31:01
  and then as soon as the, you know, they're in the official interview, she moves into this much more
• 31:05
  buttoned up for politician mode that feels I am now playing the role of
• 31:10
  Madam President just done the whole interview. Like like the real person I think you are,
• 31:16
  how you'd been in those first couple minutes, you know, what if you would, people would have
• 31:20
  Yes, yeah, yeah, that's interesting. How did the show get to Broadway? And what was it like?
• 31:27
  What was the process life of taking it from reading? It was, I mean, very secure this as
• 31:31
  there was, you know, in COVID in part, because it had been in a couple of productions before COVID,
• 31:36
  including one off-Broadway in the fall of 2019. So kind of right before COVID. And so there were,
• 31:42
  it was very, it was a small production, but it got, it was very well received. It got a really
• 31:47
  nice New York Times review and then all these producers came to see it. So there was already conversations
• 31:51
  about it moving to Broadway before COVID. And then, you know, they got much delay. So ultimately,
• 31:58
  it was a British producer, I mean, you also Brazil in New York, who sort of had optioned it and,
• 32:04
  you know, the conversation we were having in January 2020 was that she was going to do it on the
• 32:08
  West End and like fall of 2020. So then she ended up doing it and then ultimately producing it
• 32:14
  London, you know, two years later. So the global pandemic was a double blow for you. You were like,
• 32:19
  not only might it wipe out my, me and my loved ones, but also what about the West End run?
• 32:24
  I know. Yes. So it was a very, so it was a very sort of long, long route to get there, but
• 32:29
  I don't know. It all worked out. Right. And how was it? It was safe. Well, I saw that Ben
• 32:33
  Brantley and the Tons did a good ride. It was very, it was very well received and it had,
• 32:38
  you know, it was a great, I was really happy with the production. What was that like? What's
• 32:41
  the feeling like? I mean, you've been, you know, you're a playwright. It's everybody, it's
• 32:44
  every playwright's dream. Like you're sitting in the audience of a Broadway show and you're,
• 32:49
  you know, it's quite, it's quite surreal, I think. I mean, as much the sitting in the audience,
• 32:57
  as it is just sort of walking down the street and there you are with the, you know, the
• 33:02
  marquee for your play and all the Broadway plays on the road. So it's, it's wild. And the other
• 33:08
  thing I realized that is so different about having a play on Broadway than off-roadway or
• 33:13
  regionally is just the way that it kind of enters the cultural conversation much more. There's
• 33:18
  just sort of an awareness of it that there is just not for most because most people, I mean,
• 33:22
  most people don't go to theater at all, but even the, you know, the ones who do like people,
• 33:27
  sort of, a lot of people sort of don't go to a Broadway, but they won't go see other things.
• 33:31
  You know, so that's very exciting, just that people are kind of engaging with it in a, in a
• 33:34
  much broader way. Yeah. And I mean, even if they're not, even if they're not aware of the show,
• 33:39
  like I imagine that if you're chatting to someone on a plane or, you know, you're at a cocktail party
• 33:45
  or something, you know, and you know, what do you do? Oh, I'm a playwright. Then everybody
• 33:49
  immediately goes, okay, so he's a barista who writes plays in his spare time. Oh, have you done,
• 33:54
  have you had anything on it? And you're like, yeah, one of my shows is on Broadway. That's,
• 33:58
  yes, no, that's different. That is, that is a nice, that is a nice benefit. Even people who know
• 34:04
  nothing about theater, they know what Broadway is. And certainly now, same with the, you know,
• 34:11
  the play is not made for a Tony award, the Tony's are in a couple weeks. So again, that's
• 34:16
  a similar thing where it's like the people your family members are sort of, you don't know anything
• 34:21
  about everything. Like, oh, that's a, like a, some kind of marker that, yes, you're not just,
• 34:27
  yeah, you know, uh, uh, Dillett's hot. That's right. Yeah, I don't remember who said it, but,
• 34:32
  you know, after someone won an Academy Award, it was like, well, there's the first line of my
• 34:37
  obit, you know, like your obituary is now, you know, it's our written, Tony nominated playwright.
• 34:44
  And it didn't change much over the course of, I mean, we've mentioned that it's almost a decade
• 34:48
  old now, but have you had to update, I mean, not, I'm not interested in specific references or
• 34:53
  something, but is there anything about the just the thrust of the, not easily? I mean, there are
• 34:57
  a few like little things I, I, I adjusted because, as I said, like we know, like there's sort of
• 35:03
  moments where I have somebody like explain what herd immunity is, which now we just all know what
• 35:08
  that is, because we know that we're, our awareness of all of this stuff meant I could just say less,
• 35:14
  and we would all understand it. And then I, I made some changes to the end, which were not really
• 35:19
  about the times, but just about kind of clarifying, I think what was happening there between them. And
• 35:25
  then, and then I, I mean, the only very, the only thing that is in the play as a nod to COVID,
• 35:31
  really, is the last light of the play, which sort of a nod to, to us to come, you know.
• 35:37
  And the, the level, I mean, it's still stuck on the fact that you don't think that the way that
• 35:42
  the people talk in the play is satirical, because it's so close to the way that people talk in
• 35:47
  Berkeley. And I'm wondering if that has changed in the past few years. Is, what is it like?
• 35:54
  Tell me, tell me, mole who is embedded in behind the front lines of workness. What is,
• 36:02
  like the social justice thing like it? I feel like we, I think, of course, like things
• 36:07
  accelerated in a really intense way, you know, after, you know, after George Floyd was murdered,
• 36:14
  and then the pandemic and zoomed life. And then I think, I think it's much harder to say where we
• 36:20
  are now. I think people have very different ideas about where we are now. And if we are still
• 36:26
  where we were a few years ago, or if we are in a different place, like, I feel like there is,
• 36:30
  if anything, kind of a lack of consensus about, you know, just like, what is the right way to do
• 36:36
  anything? No. But I think also there's a, this is my sort of speculation, like the collapse of
• 36:41
  Twitter and sort of social media, not working in the same way. I think has, I mean, obviously,
• 36:48
  just been good for humanity in a certain way probably because I think, you know, there was such a,
• 36:54
  like Twitter was this incredible, like probably the most effective machine for creating shame that
• 37:01
  had ever existed in the world where, you know, overnight somebody could be, you know,
• 37:07
  it could be retweet, it could quote it and retweet it. You know, it's a, I think it created this
• 37:11
  strange way of people engaging with each other and sort of the internet pylons and not. And I think
• 37:18
  everyone sort of understood this is not actually like a good way to do anything or an effective way
• 37:22
  to kind of make change, but it's still this sense of moving past that and, and I mean, people still
• 37:28
  are on social media, obviously, but there's no longer a sense, I think that we are all, I think we're
• 37:33
  much more siloed in what we see. So there's, I think that sense that things can kind of blow up
• 37:39
  in that way. It doesn't really exist at least as far as I can tell in the same way. And I think
• 37:44
  that's how, but I also think it's just so much of what was everybody being a little insane,
• 37:52
  over the time, it's also just everyone being kind of locked inside in front of their computers,
• 37:55
  like you're, I think that also drove everybody a little insane. And so I think, I think as we sort of
• 38:01
  moved out of that and are just kind of people are living their lives again more, it's things,
• 38:08
  I don't know, trying to work their way towards normalcy as much as you can have normalcy under
• 38:14
  sort of rising authoritarian regime with kind of new horrors. I mean, on Twitter, I'm not sure
• 38:20
  that people didn't, that everybody knew that it was a bad way of resolving disputes. I mean,
• 38:25
  I think there was a cohort, a minority, but a cohort of people who thought that it was a great
• 38:31
  way to call people out and to enforce new rules of decency by being thoroughly indecent to each
• 38:40
  other. But like, you know, imposing new norms about the way that privileged people were able to
• 38:46
  talk about things that they shouldn't have standing to talk about. Like, I think that was,
• 38:52
  that ended up in destroying a lot of people's lives in pylons, but I think the people who were
• 38:56
  doing it were as righteous as the, as torch wielding mobs always are. Yeah, I mean, I think it's,
• 39:04
  I mean, it's like a lot of things. It's like it had, it's not that there were never any necessary
• 39:11
  or positive things that come from this, this kind of engagement and information being spread
• 39:17
  rapidly in that way. And then I think it's also that shame is a, you know, it's like a very sharp
• 39:22
  tool and it can like, spur in a response, but it's not an effective one over a long period of time.
• 39:29
  No, I'm not saying that it was good. I'm saying that the people who were engaging in,
• 39:32
  I think they're, yeah, the people doing the canceling were, I think, they thought they were on
• 39:38
  the right side of things. Oh, sure. I mean, everybody always thinks they're on the right side.
• 39:42
  Yeah, they do. But yes, but I think, I think that people, I think it's a, it's a pretty small
• 39:48
  cohort of people at this point who still feel like
• 39:52
  that's a very effective way to go about making any kind of sustainable change. Yes, yes,
• 39:59
  that's right. You know, and then that was, I mean, it, maybe it took, you know, going through that
• 40:03
  for people to sort of learn that lesson. Yeah. But again, I also, I think it's so tied up in
• 40:09
  that in that time of being in lockdown and having nothing to do. And so then this was sort of the
• 40:17
  one. Yeah, the one way of making yourself feel useful. I mean, if you were writing the play today,
• 40:22
  there would be a number of metrics from the social justice left that you could choose instead
• 40:29
  of vaccinations, right? I mean, it could, you could satirize, I don't know, land acknowledgments,
• 40:35
  so you could satirize. I don't know, you could find something in the LGBTQIA plus or trends,
• 40:42
  you know, universe or you could do black lives matter and George Floyd or something.
• 40:48
  Would you change it? Why vaccines? Well, I think, I mean, I mean, the nature of vaccines is that
• 40:56
  they only work through kind of collective decision making. And so that kind of makes them, I,
• 41:03
  I mean, on some level, that's not true. Obviously, you get your individual immunity. But like,
• 41:07
  certainly, and especially those kind of vaccines, like the MMR vaccine, they really,
• 41:11
  you know, you really need the herd immunity to protect people. And so I think that makes it kind
• 41:17
  of a unique issue because it really is one that needs to be resolved collectively in that kind of
• 41:23
  makes it different than, you know, whatever kind of racism or something. Yeah, yeah, that's
• 41:29
  interesting. And yeah, are you working on future projects that are still in the same van or
• 41:35
  are you branching off into other? No, I mean, I, you know, every play is different. I,
• 41:42
  yes, because then my newest play, which I just had a production in Florida earlier in the year
• 41:47
  and hoping to get it to New York next year, you know, is after the controversy of vaccine,
• 41:52
  decided to take something really easy. It's about the, sort of about the fracture of the American
• 41:59
  Jewish community, you know, post-doctor 7th. And so, you know, something that nobody,
• 42:06
  Israel and Palestine and being a thing, nobody has any strong. It's quite, it'd be quite smooth
• 42:12
  sailing. Yeah, wow, that's interesting. I just had on the show an Israeli historian professor
• 42:17
  Amos Goldberg, who is, like, writing a lot in harrets and teaching a lot and studying a lot
• 42:27
  about why Garza is genocide. And he's one of these voices inside Israel who are increasingly
• 42:33
  pilloried for, like, saying, like, you know, his basic point is, like, of any time, you know,
• 42:41
  a country commits war crimes, there's a good reason for it in the point of view of the country,
• 42:47
  and it's defenders. But there comes a point at which it citizens have to be like that you can
• 42:52
  no longer justify this on the basis of the initial transgression. Anyway, it's tough. Yeah, no,
• 43:01
  and it's, and it's, I mean, you know, for me, in, in the writing of that, I've never tried to,
• 43:07
  I mean, it was this sort of commission to do this by theater and I said no several times before I
• 43:12
  agreed to say yes. But, and part of it is I've never tried to write about something that was
• 43:16
  already in the zeitgeist because it's sort of, it's very hard because there's so many voices
• 43:22
  all the time. So it becomes difficult to sort of hear your own voice. And so part of that in writing
• 43:27
  this play is that I, it's not really, I mean, it's not that there are no arguments in the play,
• 43:31
  but it's not a play about people making arguments about, you know, about Garza because it's,
• 43:37
  you know, people have, those are, those are out there. People have heard them all the
• 43:43
  amount of times. So there's no point, we don't need to sit down in the theater to listen to the
• 43:46
  same thing that we've heard, you know, a thousand times already. People articulate, you know,
• 43:51
  it's much more about it. It follows a group of, you know, group of friends over over almost
• 43:56
  20 years. So it's much more about kind of, I don't know, I think that yeah, the fracture sort of
• 44:00
  within that American Jewish community, but then more broadly, again, as, as standing in for,
• 44:06
  I guess like society as a whole, you know, the play starts 2006, which is the year before
• 44:11
  the iPhone came out in the year before, um, Facebook went into like wide usage and then it goes
• 44:17
  through 2024. So sort of also trying to track kind of how technology has changed the way we,
• 44:24
  we live the way we engage with any kind of issue like this, you know. Yeah, interesting,
• 44:28
  interesting. Yeah. I mean, as they say, the specific is always universal, isn't it? If you can talk
• 44:33
  focus on the lives of the human beings, then all of the political arguments will, um, will spill
• 44:39
  from that, from the human stories. If I told you when you were writing, um, you know, 10 years ago,
• 44:46
  whatever it was, that it would be relevant in 2025 and would be on Broadway and Tony Nomadode
• 44:54
  in 2025, as well as being happy, would you have been surprised that politics on the left had not
• 45:01
  evolved so far that it felt alien to an audience in 2025? No, I mean, again, because I just wasn't,
• 45:09
  you know, when I was writing and I wasn't really thinking about the, I mean, I was thinking about
• 45:13
  the politics in the sense of like the particular contradiction at the heart of these kind of,
• 45:23
  progressive private schools because they are committed to social justice and yet by their
• 45:30
  nature of being private and charging tuition, even if they're a lot of scholarships, like it,
• 45:34
  it's still, it's not open to everyone, it's, you know, by its nature, it's not a full embrace
• 45:40
  of social justice because it's exclusionary and that conflict is, is kind of, you know,
• 45:45
  irresolvable in these kind of institutions. And so that, that was sort of the
• 45:50
  political angle that was, there was interesting to me, I think that the rest of it, it was more about
• 45:54
  just trying to, because I was, at the time living in Berkeley, it was a commission for a theater in
• 45:58
  Berkeley and so it was really just trying to write something that would feel as authentic
• 46:03
  to Berkeley as, as possible.
• 46:06
  Amazing. I mean, if you'd told me that it was written by someone who'd never been to Berkeley,
• 46:09
  but only knew the cliches of Berkeley, that would have been equally plausible since it's,
• 46:14
  it's an incredible snapshot. Are you going to come to Australia for the Australian production?
• 46:18
  Do a text about a trip? No, I don't, I don't, unfortunately, I don't.
• 46:21
  Claim it back. The irres, irres method.
• 46:25
  Yes, no, they have it well, they haven't offered to deflate me out. I was, they were,
• 46:29
  another, you know, there was an Australian production in Adelaide in 2020,
• 46:34
  at the, the state theater of South Australia was 20, maybe 2021.
• 46:38
  Yeah, we've been 2021. But I know they, they maybe would have run me out, but that was the time when like,
• 46:44
  yeah, you couldn't enter Australia.
• 46:46
  No, I know. We were locked down for two years. You're welcome.
• 46:51
  Okay, well, I hope it goes great in Sydney. And good luck at the time. It is a, I know,
• 46:56
  yeah, and it's lovely to speak to you. Thanks for giving us your time.
• 46:58
  Yeah, you too. Thanks.
• 47:00
  All right. Take care.