In Part 1 of our Theatre in Community interview with Ernie Joselovitz of DC Playwrights’ Forum, we discuss his early days at UCLA studying playwrighting and then developing as a playwright. Then, we discuss his move to DC to work with New Playwrights’ Theatre as their Playwright-in-Residence with the late Harry Bagdasian.  

Part 2 begins with Ernie’s founding of the Playwrights’ Forum and explores his extensive work with developing new plays and playwrights.  

A quick note to listeners: On each episode of our Theatre in Community series, we include a glossary of theatre terms and names referenced in the interview. 

Elizabeth: [00:00:00] Welcome to the Theatre in Community interview series of Creativists in Dialogue, a podcast embracing the creative life. I’m Elizabeth Bruce.

Michael: And I’m Michael Oliver.

Elizabeth: And our guest today is longtime friend and colleague Ernie Joselovitz. A beloved local American playwright, dramaturge, and playwriting coach, Ernie Joselovitz spent his adolescence and college years in Los Angeles. But he’s been a resident of Washington, DC and the surrounding area for more than 50 years. His play, Hagar’s Children, was produced by Joseph Papp at the New York Shakespeare Festival’s Public Theater in 1977. His 69 plays have been produced off Broadway and all around the USA.

For many years, he was playwright in residence at DC’s New Playwrights’ Theatre, working hand in glove with the founder and artistic director, the late Harry [00:01:00] Bagdasian. Ernie has won numerous awards, including Source Theatre’s Literary Prize for California Cowboy, and two $50,000 prizes from the Fund for New American Plays.

As founder and artistic director of his organization, The Playwrights’ Forum in Washington, DC, Ernie has guided the development of hundreds of playwrights and their plays for over 50 years.

He earned a B.A. in English from UCLA, where he worked his way through school at the Beverly Hills Public Library, graduating Phi Beta Kappa. Ernie has an M.F.A. in playwriting from the University of Minnesota. He and his wonderful wife, Elaine Joselovitz, have been married for 56 years and have numerous grandnieces and grandnephews. Welcome, Ernie.

Ernie: Thank you.

Michael: We like to start at the beginning of one’s creative journey. What were some of your earliest experiences of any kind of creativity, either [00:02:00] as a participant or as a witness?

Ernie: The first thing I remember, I was about five or six years old and I was going to write a story, and I did. I started writing a story—I didn’t know how to write stories—about the Yangtze River in China. I knew nothing about it! All I knew about it was that it was in China, which was very exotic, ‘cause you’d see these movies—I didn’t know anything about China, and I didn’t know anything, I never was on a river, so here I was on the Yangtze River, and I started writing “Adventures on the Yangtze River,” and I did that for a while, and then that was the end of that. That’s the first thing I remember, creatively, that I ever did.

On the observant side of it, I really didn’t—my mom wanted me to be cultured. She also wanted me to be a doctor, but she wanted me to be a culture doctor. So she thought opera, was opera, but it was really Indian Love Song at the state fair. And I saw that, and I can’t remember a thing about it. I was maybe six or seven or eight or something, and she took me to that. And [00:03:00] I remember seeing a school production. We had to go all the way down—this was in Danbury, Connecticut, when I was a little kid—we had to go all the way down to downtown and to the movie theater, and they showed us, they had, they did a play, a Peter Pan play. I don’t remember that either. And that was it.

The first play I ever saw, professional play I ever saw, was when I was about 15 or 16, at the Biltmore Hotel—this is back in LA now—the Biltmore Hotel. The only theater, the only traveling theater, like a national theater kind of thing. And they had the National Theatre of England was there doing a Shaw play. And it was with Joan Plowright doing it. She was very young at the time. Now that I remember. I had to walk about two miles to get on to a Metro thing, electric car, and go. And then I had to take a bus and then I had to walk somewhere to get to the Biltmore Hotel. And when I got there, I had my ticket. I had a cheap ticket. [00:04:00] I didn’t understand, I just, I had no money. So I bought a ticket. It must’ve been $5. And they said, and I said, I showed him the ticket, “You gotta go up the steps there.” I went up the steps. And I’m, “You gotta go up the steps there.” And I’m going up the steps. And then I’m showing him, and he says, “Oh, you gotta go up. See the fire escape? You gotta go up the fire escape.” I did the fire escape and you come, and I came out and I’m on the second or third balcony. And it’s like this, it’s like your knees are wrapped around the head of the person in front of you, and you’re seeing bald spots. And so, I, that’s, I remember. But I, so I saw that. I was very impressed with that.

And then when I was 18 and I went to New York, and I had some money ‘cause I had worked summers. That was another thing my mom wanted me to do, work summers. And so I had some money and I wanted to see a Broadway show. So, I got a ticket to, of course, Gypsy because I thought I would see naked women and that’s what I did. Gypsy was amazing. First [00:05:00] I was, of course, sitting, way up in the balcony there, but it didn’t matter. The first thing I can remember, I remember it so vividly. The first thing I remember is this middle-aged woman, this dumpy middle-aged woman coming down the aisle, downstairs, up to the stage, and she, oh, and she starts to sing. And it was like Ethel Merman. Ethel Merman. I’m sitting there wanting to see naked girls, but I couldn’t get my eyes off of her. She was just, that was, I was, I thought, “This is as close to heaven as I’ll ever be is this Gypsy,” the original cast of Gypsy. And she had a song, she did “Everything’s Coming Up Roses.” She did this song, I swear to you, she didn’t need a mic. You could have heard her across the street. She had that kind of a voice. And she really was a good actress when she was singing. She was not a good actress as an actress. She needed to be in a musical. And she would have it down like that. She would have every movement was exactly the same. I noticed that years later. So, she—and this was the end of [00:06:00] the second, the end of the second act, this was a three-act kind of thing, and it was a big climactic—and she’s in the middle of the desert with Jack Klugman is the guy with her. Who knew who Jack Klugman was? And she’s got her girl there. And they have no money, and they don’t know what the hell they’re doing, and they don’t know where they are. And she’s got her back to the audience, er back to the audience, and she’s singing, “Everything’s Coming Up Roses.” And before it’s over with, we’re all crying. That’s how great she was. So that for me was, but it was like, oh, my God.

Elizabeth: So just let me let our listeners know, anybody who’s under 50 or 60, Gypsy is based on the life of Gypsy Rose Lee, who was a famous stripper, exotic dancer, et cetera.

Ernie: And her part was by someone named Churchill or somebody, Sarah. And she was not a very good actress and never did anything, but all she did, she, even in the movie, which was Natalie Wood, all she ever did is take her goddamn glove off. That’s all she ever did!

Michael: That’s all she needed to do. [00:07:00]

Ernie: That’s all. But I didn’t, I was not pleased with that. I spent six dollars and I saw—but I couldn’t, Ethel Merman was

Elizabeth: To fast forward a little bit or jump over a few decades, in an article by Judith Weinraub in the Washington Post several years ago, you commented that your late mother, whom you have, quote, “immortalized,” according to the article, “immortalized as a character in a series of plays”—

Ernie: Yes.

Elizabeth: —had hoped, as you just mentioned, you “would choose a profession, maybe one with some social status like doctor, lawyer, college professor, or dentist. In that order.”

Ernie: In that order.

Elizabeth: But she couldn’t really complain when you got the largest fellowship in the country at the time from the Rockefeller Foundation, it was a full fellowship that paid for everything at the University of Minnesota for two years in the playwriting program. And in that article, you said you found a way of, quote, “rebelling without [00:08:00] actually rebelling.” So tell us, Ernie, what drew you to playwriting as a creative profession?

Ernie: It hadn’t to do with my mother. My mother wanted me to be cultured and I beat her to it because I, she wanted me to be a cultured doctor and I ended up being an English major and that threw her for a loop. And but she didn’t pay, I had a, she had no money for me to go to, she wanted me to go to college but she had no idea where the money was gonna, she thought my grandfather would give me the money. That means her ex-husband’s father was going to give me the money to go to college. I hadn’t met him for 30 years, for my whole life. I don’t think I remembered meeting him when I was four, and he was the only rich person in our family. So my mom thought, oh, he’ll give me the money. Absolutely ridiculous. So, I got home with no money and got into UCLA with and got a loan and I worked my way through college. And then I became this playwright.

And what to get to, [00:09:00] what got me into theater. It was actors. Totally actors. I took two classes of Acting I and II, at UCLA. To give you a background of what it was like back then, UCLA had a film department, which was the only film department in the country probably, and it was very good. I think I took the acting class to meet girls. As usual, when I’m 18. And I don’t know why I did it. I didn’t dare tell my mother that I was taking an acting class. And I got in, and they were outliers. I was always an outlier. Always, my whole life, I was a loner. And outsider, always. For instance, I’m the only Jew in my whole family, of anybody in the family, in my generation, the only Jewish person.

Elizabeth: You’re the only practicing, observant Jew?

Ernie: Period Jew.  It’s a long story about my mother and my grandmother and—

Elizabeth: Is that right? I didn’t realize that.

Ernie: Oh, yeah. So I was, right from the start, I was in a high school. There were three Jews, me and two others, and their name [00:10:00] was Rose, so hardly anybody knew, but my name was Joselovitz. And on Tuesdays and Thursdays, I was going to Hebrew school, so they would say, “Where are you going?” And I would say, “Hebrew school.” And they’d go, “Oh?” We were a terrible school. And there were about 30 of us that were going to go to college out of about 300 in our class, and I was about number 28. I needed to get into the into the Knights, it was called the Knights, which was the honor program over there, a service program. And so to go to college, you needed to do that, to get these extracurricular things. And these people that I took classes with all year in Latin and in all the sciences and math, they didn’t like me, they voted against me to get in that until the final semester when the counselor said, “You gotta let him in because he’s going to college.” You butt-heads. And they let me, reluctantly, let me in.

So, I was really an outsider all the time. But these people were outsiders, these actors, they—give you an idea how goofy it was back [00:11:00] then—the stage was two World War II bungalows put together, and they had 50 seats and the stage, you put in a curtain and a bat would come out every time, there was a bat lived there, and the first row of seats was all broken, and that was their theater. That was the theater.

Elizabeth: That was the theater, yeah.

Ernie: Yes, now the film department had MGM, so they did really, they were doing great, and all the pretty women were in there. Anita Ekberg was in the film department. She was not in the theater department. I never saw her until I found out she was the homecoming queen. And I took one look, and I went, “Oh my god, did I pick the wrong department?” We’re talking gorgeous here. In my department was people like Carol Burnett. The interesting women.

But what was fascinating, so we were in the oldest building in the campus, the old campus, Royce Hall, and we were in the boiler room. That’s where they put us. So these were outliers. These were [00:12:00] daring people. And I loved them. I just fell in love with them. I was a terrible actor. I couldn’t memorize anything. And I’ll give you an example of how bad I was. We had to do a final scene, a monologue. They were all doing Shakespeare. So I decided to do a Samson Agonistes by Milton. Now, yes. So here I am, 122 pounds soaking wet, no chin, dirty, nerdy. And I didn’t even think about it. I’m doing Samson and I did it. I did a good job, but there was no applause. And this one woman, she raised her hand and she said, “I really loved it when I closed my eyes.” Yeah, that was me.

I got through those classes. But I thought there’s got to be a way. I took directing. I knew I wasn’t going to be acting. I was a terrible director. I was a terrible tech. I had to just stay away from tech. I couldn’t stand it. They drove me crazy. And it took me four years to get into a playwriting [00:13:00] class because there was a big argument between the English department and the theater department about who was going to teach it. So I, and I lucked out. I got into it my fourth year. I took five years of undergrad school as I was working 25 hours a week.

I finally got the class, and instead of George Savage, who was the regular teacher, he took a year off, he was a mediocre writer, who was a typical college teacher of writing, playwriting, and I got Donald Davis. Now, Donald Davis was a guest lecturer. He was the son of Owen Davis. Owen Davis was one of the, was one of the great second-rate writers in America. He wrote everything for 50 years. He won a Pulitzer Prize in 1925 or something with a play he wrote. Then he wrote radio, then he wrote television. His son was with him the whole time. Donald Davis was very practical. It wasn’t theories and everything. First thing I did was, [00:14:00] gave him a play, I had written it in the summer, and I gave him this play, and it was a good play, pretty good play, one act, little one act play. This is my first play I ever wrote in my life. And he was very impressed that I had written it, before the class even. So he took me aside, which he did with a lot of us. He took me aside and he said, “Okay, what are you going to write next?” And I said, “What did you think of the—“ “What are you going to write next? Don’t worry about what I think. And I said, I want to write a play about Nabokov.” Not Nabokov. A dancer. There’s a dancer who—can’t remember his name. Diaghilev. Diaghilev was that. So I was going to write that. I had read the, his autobiography and I was absolutely entranced by it. And so I wrote that.

Oh, and then he said, “Five weeks. Give it to me in five weeks.” So five weeks, I gave him the play and I went back in and he said, “Okay.” It was a monologue, really. I could write, I learned that I could write characters. I didn’t know how to write a play. But I got to write, this is really basically a monologue. [00:15:00] And so he said, “Okay, what are you going to write next?” I said, “What did you—?” “Don’t ask. You got to get, you got to oil your wheels here. You just got to write. Just write and learn as you write. What are you going to write next?” I thought I’d write a play about my grandfather. He said, “Fine.” He said, “Give me a little, tell me a little about it.” I told him. He said, “Here’s a clue.” He gave me a little clue. And he said, “Five weeks.” I came in. “What are you going to write next?” This went on for five plays.

Finally, he did a reading of Jesse’s Land, which was the play about my grandfather, which was again, a monologue. Two of us were sitting there and he did all the talking and then Ernie was here listening. He was like, “Oh, what about this?” So I was doing, but, and I was really, it was just done by students. I was so impressed. I was like, geez, I never heard a play of mine read out loud by anybody! And so then I also helped him. He put together a workshop production of some of the other playwrights, not me. [00:16:00] And, and I helped him with it. So I was in theater watching rehearsals and staging and everything like that. So he really was the right person for me at the right time. So then I took him the second year. That’s when I wrote my first full length play.

Michael: And would you say your development of the craft of storytelling through playwriting came about through just doing it over and over again?

Ernie: He, when he thought I was ready, I was writing my first full length play, that’s when he would give me some clues. I remember I went back to see him. I went back to LA to be with him, to have him as my advisor. And he was already by then not even teaching anymore. He was doing a lot of doctoring, writing, for Broadway and stuff. He did a lot of that. And he was writing his own play, which he’s never finished. But anyway, Donald Davis was Donald Davis. And he, I wrote Hagar’s Children, and I gave him a copy of it. And he said, “This is really, you got a really great first act. And you have a really good third act. Where’s your second act?” And I went, [00:17:00] “What do you mean?” And he said, “You gotta write a second act. You gotta, you can’t go from here to here. You got in the middle.” It took me a year to write that. He was the one that guided me through it. That was the play. He said, “That’s the one. That’s the one.”

Michael: Alright. At the age of 35, after you’d written, what, five or six full productions and worked your ass off, as you say, in cafeteria, you finally enjoyed some sudden success and had your play, Hagar’s Children, picked up and produced at Joseph Papp’s Public Theater in New York’s East Village. As our listeners may know, the Public Theater is renowned for, among other things, its signature Shakespeare in the Park and the hundreds of awards it’s won. Can you talk about this early experience?

Ernie: Yes, Joe Papp. I wrote that play and I sent that play, Hagar’s [00:18:00] Children, out. Donald Davis said, “This is a really good play.” You start, you send—I had written by that time, ten plays, about ten plays. And I had never, and I had one production of a play called Parable, which was, I won’t even talk about that one because it was a terrible, it was—never mind, that was awful. And all my fault.

And then we had, then Arthur Ballet, the great Arthur Ballet at the University of Minnesota, had a grant from the, he had a thing called the Office of Advanced Drama Research. Four wonderful words. All it really meant was that he subsidized productions in Minneapolis from the Rockefeller Foundation. They gave him a lot of money. So he brought me out there to do my first production. That was all I had happen for 10 years. For 10 years I was working in a cafeteria putting plates for the, and learning the word “trabajo”. They were all Hispanics there. And the one word they kept saying to me was, “Trabajo!”

Elizabeth: “Trabajo” as in “work.”

Ernie: Yeah, “Work!” And they were great people. I was like, it was great for me to be there because these were blue collar, these [00:19:00] were immigrants who were just starting out, and they worked their butts off, and I really liked being with them. We were a team. If one person sloughed off, the whole damn thing fell apart. You had to, everybody had to be doing what they had to do. It was much harder than people think. You go to a cafeteria, you don’t think twice about it. But I’m telling you, it’s a bitch. It was really good for me. But I was doing that, and I wrote all these plays.

I sent Hagar’s Children out, and it was turned down by 50 theaters. In those days—

Elizabeth: Really?

Ernie: Yeah. In those days, I would keep, the only time I ever did this, I’d keep the rejection slips. Because that’s what Arthur Miller did. And I was very into Arthur Miller. So I had these 50 rejections, and I was like, I don’t know, I don’t, and they sent me letters explaining why. They would say things like, “Thank you so much for sending us your play, unfortunately we can’t really find it in our program. Don’t think of us again.”

Michael: Did you, like, post these on the wall?

Ernie: Yeah, I did! I actually had them all over. And then I got [00:20:00] a call or a note or something. I was in San Francisco at that time and there was a theater there—I can’t remember the name of it. It’s one of the things I’m bad at. Not Center Stage, but it was the one theater—

Elizabeth: American Contemporary Theater? ACT?

Ernie: ACT. Okay. So I got a letter from them saying, “We want to do a workshop production.” And I went, “Sure.” They didn’t mention money. By the way, no, no money. But, we’re going to do 10 performances. It’s going to be a workshop production. This is a new program we’ve got. You’re going to be in our little thing called The Unit. You can come and watch and listen to our other playwrights, all of whom were terrible and, but there’s never mentioned money, but I said, Jesus Christ, I’m going for this, I’m going for this! Right next door. I was like three blocks away from them after all these theaters said no, they said—and I had this guy, the guy that was directing it had one name. So right away, I’m thinking, “Oh boy. Oh boy, one name. This is bad.” And he was one of the boys—to make it, let me make this delicate. The artistic director was gay. And he had boys.

Elizabeth: Oh.

Ernie: Yes. [00:21:00]

Elizabeth: Like his fan club.

Ernie: His fan club, and this was one of them. And so he was going to direct my play. So I thought, “Oh boy.” But I was thrilled. He did a great job. He did a great, he did it stylistically, very stylized, which is the way I meant it to be written. And it was, oh my God, it was like, the word went out and it was packed, the place was packed. They never did another play of mine my whole life, which happened to me all the time. I was Mr. Charm. And so, then that was done and it was sat there, it sat there, ‘cause they didn’t get any reviews. There were no reviews. ‘Cause it was a workshop. Even though it was ACT.

So then a little theater in Denver, I can’t remember the name of it. I have it written down here somewhere. Doesn’t matter. A nice group of people. They sent me a letter rejecting my play. And I wrote them back and I said, “You’re rejecting my play because you didn’t like the idea of me writing this particular play about these kids who are abused and who are being treated for being abused.” And they wrote back and said—I never did that before, I was just PO’d [00:22:00] at them—and they sent me back a letter saying, “We’ve been arguing about your play for months and in fact, we changed our mind. We’re going to do your play.”

Elizabeth: Interesting.

Ernie: They didn’t mention any money. So off I go to Denver and I’m working with them for the first public production. And they were this little theater, and they weren’t talented a lot. They were a small little young theater, and the space I don’t remember, but it wasn’t a great space. But they put their heart and souls into it. And it was a big hit and the critics loved it and they extended the run and everything. So that was great. So then it sat there.

And then I got a call was from Harry Bagdasian. Harry Bagdasian—this is what happened with that one, it’s the craziest thing how these things happen. It doesn’t happen the way people think and in the movies. It’s not the way it is. Not for me. Harry was moving. He had a theater called New Playwrights’ Theatre and him and Paul Hildebrand and Kenny Bloom were moving it from one space into the space they ended up using a gymnasium, yeah, on Church Street. [00:23:00] And so they were releasing it. And there was a whole bunch of scripts sitting in the old place, and he was going to dump them and he spotted my play. And he thought it was a Bible play, Hagar’s Children. So he thought, “Gee, that’s interesting.” I don’t know why he thought it was interesting, Harry is not a religious guy, but I don’t know. So he read it, and right away, Harry’s this kind of guy, right away, “I want to do this play.” That was Harry. Calls me up and says, “I want to do this play.” And I went, “Sure.” And yes! Not much, but it was a contract. We finally had a written—he was very, he loved playwrights. Harry loved playwrights.

And off I go, and I go out there, and he has Bobby Small directing. Bobby never directed to play before. He was a very nice guy and he; I don’t know where he came, I don’t know who, I got to know him really well, but he was my director. So, what he did was he did something fabulous. He did it very realistically, which is not the way I wanted the play to be done. It had chants in it. You, how can you do chants and do it, but he had actual [00:24:00] teenagers doing the roles of the teenagers. And he did a great and they were just, with the cast—first of all, the play was a good play. Then the second thing about it was the people would sit there, they’d go, “These are really just kids. They really are just teenagers!” And they were just flabbergasted, the audiences, because they were so good, and they were real. Because they were really—and it was, oh my god. It was, it was went crazy. That was the first play that they had done that was a non-musical that was a big hit for them. That was any kind of a hit for them. Harry picked some a lot of bad plays. The one big hits he had were the musicals by Timmy Grundmann, which we’ll talk about. Timmy was a genius.

And so then, he, I don’t know why, Harry was this way. He had some kind of connection with Joe Papp. And so, he called up Papp and he said, “I got this play out here that you may want to see. It’s a big hit, we have a big hit.” And Papp happened to be interested in abused children. I think he had a son or a daughter. But just at that time, he [00:25:00] was, so he sent someone down to see it and the guy came back and said, “You gotta go to see this.” And Papp went down there, and he saw it and he came backstage right after the performance and he said, “I wanna bring this play up.”

Elizabeth: Wow.

Ernie: Right then and there he said it. I about fell over. I had no idea what he was talking about, and off we go. The whole cast.

Elizabeth: Oh, he took the entire production?

Ernie: The director, everybody, and me, everybody went up there. We went up to do it. He had the idea it was going to be a realistic play as well. So it was done, it was not a great production, but in any, and Bobby was a little overwhelmed and so was I. I met him once twice, Papp. The first time when I got there and he sat me down and he, and I didn’t think he was very star-like at all. He was just this guy. And he’s just welcomed me. And talked a little about the play and said, “Go do your play.” And he left us alone. He was very—but he had already decided on a set. When I was walking out of the door there. I saw this great big staircase. Going up to the third floor. And so it was going to be a realistic set. [00:26:00] And that was that. And that’s the way it was going to be.

The next time I saw him was when it opened, it was opening, and my mom came to see the play all the way from LA. I don’t know how I got her out there. I had no, I still didn’t have any money. Even though this was pretty good money. Pretty good money. And ‘cause Papp was wonderful. In that regard, he was wonderful. And so he had this, the theater was not on, it was off on Soho or somewhere, it was a, it was that building he got, it was, it used to be a Jewish building. Rabbis used to live there and stuff. And he was smart. He got it from the city. They didn’t know what to do with it. The Jews didn’t know what to do with it and the city didn’t know what to do with it. And so Papp came along and said, “Give it to me.”

Elizabeth: Interesting.

Ernie: “Give it to me. I’ll pay a dollar. I’ll lease it for ‘ya, every year I’ll give you a dollar.” Fine.

Elizabeth: Those were the days.

Ernie: He was a smart—Papp could talk, Papp was so smart. So, anyway, so then he had the three theaters in there and there I was. My mom came in and the [00:27:00] first thing she said was, “Where’s the billboard? For my son. You don’t have his name on the billboard, and you don’t, you have to have, there’s no traffic out there, people. How are they going to come and see my son’s play? You got to have his name on there.” That’s what she talked about to Joe Papp. Yeah, he went, yes, he understood, he was Jewish. He had a Jewish mother. He right away understood and he let that one go right by my mom. Oh, it was the damnedest thing. That was Joe Papp. He was, I hardly knew him, really. And he never did another play of mine. As usual with me. But he, he really committed. He was like Harry. Harry would commit to a play, or a playwright and Harry committed to a playwright really big, very strong, and he was very enthusiastic and very supportive with me. Even if you did a flop play, and I did a couple for him, he didn’t care. “What’s your next play? We’re going to put it on.” That’s it. We’ll talk about Harry though. Harry is amazing.

Elizabeth: So if I’m understanding correctly, you got to DC [00:28:00] through—

Ernie: Harry.

Elizabeth: — your connection with Harry Bagdasian and New Playwrights’.

Ernie: He got me a National Endowment grant as a resident playwright the next year.

Elizabeth: That’s right.

Ernie: That’s what it was. And then I got one on my own from the National Endowment. And then I got some grants from the city.

Elizabeth: Oh, from DC.

Ernie: Yeah, DC Commission on the Arts.

Elizabeth: Shout out to the DC Commission on the Arts and Humanities.  

Ernie: Oh, yes. They gave me, not much, and then I was making some money on the plays, but my wife was working. My wife made almost all the money. I was, when I left there, after six years, I was there as a resident, a resident playwright, and a do-everything kind of person. Then I, then the Forum started, and I made a little money there.

Elizabeth: Speaking of New Playwrights’, and I understand you joined New Playwrights’ in its early days, not at the very beginning, but like in the theater’s fourth year or so. You’ve talked about how New Playwrights’ did Hagar’s Children, was the first non-musical they’d produced. For listeners who either are not from DC or who don’t remember DC ‘s New Playwrights’ [00:29:00] Theatre, I want to give a little context about your cherished, Ernie, your cherished and lifelong friend, the late Harry Bagdasian. So let me quote from Harry’s website to conceptualize the importance of Harry and New Playwrights’. Here it is, quote, “Harry Michael Bagdasian was a pioneer in the Washington, DC small theatre movement, the precursor to DC’s large and now flourishing professional theater community.  He was a founding board member for the Helen Hayes Awards, and he wrote, directed and produced the inaugural awards ceremony at The National Theatre in Washington, DC. He co-founded Washington’s New Playwrights’ Theatre and led its growth for 12 years producing 72 productions (nearly all of which were world premieres) and hundreds of readings of new plays and musicals. In addition, Harry was a founding member of The League of Washington Theatres—”

Ernie: Yes.

Elizabeth: “—the first association of non-profit [00:30:00] professional theaters in the Nation’s Capital.” Ernie, as someone who was here, who was there at New Playwrights’ and in DC, in the DC theatre scene, can you describe both the genesis of New Playwrights’ and its significance in the theatrical environment of DC?

Ernie: It was very significant because he did, Harry decided, he was with Paul Hildebrandt at the time who was more of an academic and faded away, and with Kenny Bloom, who was a good friend of his. And he was a dropout, he dropped out of University of Maryland, Harry did. So here he was, and I don’t know how they got, they were working in a basement somewhere in DC, and then they were part of a larger organization and then they dropped out of that, and they moved, and they started, and they restarted with his own organization. And then they moved to where I was. To the new space. And by the time I got there, they’d been around for—now what they were doing was, Harry did a lot of amazing things, here’s one [00:31:00] amazing thing he did. I’ll give you two or three.

Musicals. Kenny Bloom found Tim Grundmann. Tim Grundmann was this nothing-looking guy, and he wrote a musical. The lyrics and the book and the whole thing. And Kenny said, “This guy can write. This guy can write.” So they, here’s a little theater, with two hundred and fifty seats. No money. Kenny Bloom. They did this musical, not only, it was a world premiere musical, they had five actors who were splendid actors that Kenny found: Dana Vance, Fred Shiffman, who was the funniest man I ever saw in my life—not in real life. He wasn’t funny in real life, but boy, you put him on the stage and he was just amazing. And Dana Vance was gorgeous and a wonderful actress. And, and Barbara Rappaport, who still, she still is. So they had these five actors. And they did this musical, and it was a silly musical. It was funny, and silly, and just [00:32:00] silly. But it was so much fun. And the music was so good. And the lyrics were wonderful, wonderful, comic lyrics. And clever as hell. So they decided, Harry says—and they sold out. Jesus, they sold out. Little bitty theater.

“Let’s do another one.” A year goes by, Kenny says, “Okay, let’s start, we’re going to go into rehearsal.” Now, Timmy drank a lot, so he wasn’t quite ready for the next production. And he had written three or four songs and wrote the first scene. So Kenny says, “Okay,” gets to cast his five, “Okay, let’s read the first scene.” They did, and they sang the song and he said, “Okay. We’ll do the next scene tomorrow.” He always said that. “We’ll work on the rest of it tomorrow.” He didn’t have anything else! He had two more songs and didn’t have a second scene. So he’d go home with Timmy and they’d write the, he’d write, Timmy would write the scene. That’s how they did it. They just put it together. [00:33:00] And it was amazing! That second play was another big hit. And then the next year they did another one. And they kept just doing them.

Now they, after a while, Timmy got really tired and under a lot of pressure and was drinking too much. So they had to get him to the hospital and save his life, which they did. Oh, yeah.

So Harry was doing an original world premiere musical every fucking year. Timmy, I’ll give you a little side on Timmy. Timmy Grundmann did get better. And he, after he left the theater, after Harry left, he left, went down to—I don’t know why he did any of these things—he went down to Florida, to Disney World. And he was the rehearsal pianist. That’s what he did. He went from there to being one of their top musical writers for their film department before he died.

Elizabeth: Interesting.

Ernie: He was brilliant. And Harry found him, not found him, but just said, “We’re going to do your plays, [00:34:00] musicals every damn year. I don’t care if they’re bad or good or anything, we’re going to do them.” And he had so much confidence in Timmy. And Timmy picked that up. Kenny, who was a lousy director, but he was good with Timmy. And so that was just one person.

The other thing Harry did, I’ll give you another example of some crazy things he did. He had a fundraiser. So what he decided to do was do a 24 hour fundraiser.

Michael: Oh, I remember that.

Ernie: Remember that? And he was on, the first one was on the radio. I don’t know how he got these—Harry could talk people into a lot of things. Except make, getting money. He didn’t know how to get any money from anybody, but he could get them to do anything. And he—like me—so he gets on the radio, and he, and so it starts out, and he’s doing full productions. Full productions of these, of plays, for 24 hours. So, three o’clock in the morning, he was doing one of my one-act plays. And there were like 20 people there, and it was on the radio. [00:35:00] That’s what he would do. Who would ever think of doing something as goofy as that? And he did that for three or four years.

He did a one act, he decided to have a one act contest. Jesus, it was, he was going to give them money and do a production of a one act play, and he, anybody could send in a script, but we got 300 scripts.

Elizabeth: Wow.

Ernie: And we, by that time, we had a couple of readers. Harry didn’t have readers until I came along, or Lloyd, we’ll talk about Lloyd, who decided we needed readers. So we all were reading these scripts and we picked them out and we did, Harry did that. What the hell was that all about? Harry would do these things. Harry loved playwrights. And he would, for instance, there was he picked a lot of bad plays. But Mark Stein, I’ll give you an example. Now Mark was a good writer, not a good enough writer, but a good writer. And he wrote a play, and it was not a hit. It was a very interesting play, though. Really interesting play. And Harry said, “Okay”—flop play—”What’s your next play?” That was it. And he did that with everybody. Harry was just so [00:36:00] enthusiastic about everything.

Michael: I mean New Playwrights’ was one of the few theaters, I think, in the country that really had dedicated itself.

Ernie: Absolutely!

Michael: And that during the ‘70s and ‘80s. I would like to, if you could just zoom in on the process of developing new plays and new playwrights.

Ernie: There was not a process. What happened was Harry got hold of some really good people. One of them was Lloyd Rose. Lloyd Rose had just got out of college and was, I don’t know what the hell she was doing there, but she became a reader for us, that’s when—somebody decided we needed readers, to read the plays that we were getting by then. And then she ended up being the literary manager. Lloyd was, like, brilliant person. She was difficult. She became a very good friend of mine, but boy, she could be really difficult. She could be Katherine Hepburn and you didn’t want to be around her when she was Katherine Hepburn. But she was brilliant. So, she was a dramaturge, and she was one person. Then there was me, and there was [00:37:00] another guy who was a friend of Lloyd’s. And with Harry, we were the ones who would bring in the playwright. Once we decided to do that, to do a reading of the play, we’d always do a reading first, and then work from there. I was very good at knowing what the problem with the play was. And being constructive about it. I always was good at that. That’s why I did the Playwrights’ Forum.

Michael: But there was no, like, workshop production in between reading and full production?

Ernie: No, there was a—I did that later as I formed my own way of doing things, but no. We could do a house reading, like, on a Wednesday, we’d bring actors in and they would read it off, they’d read it. And then if that went well, we would do, New Playwrights’ would do a public reading, a one-night public reading, and then there’d be a decision to do the play. So, it was always done that way. It was never—except for Timmy’s plays, because Timmy didn’t have them written yet. See? But that was Timmy. And it was me too. When he had confidence, when he picked you, it, you, he’s was going to do your play. Now, I might’ve said, “I want to do a reading first, so I know what the hell I’m [00:38:00] doing. And then we do it.” But that was me. Harry didn’t need it. He said, “Let’s just do the damn play.” But normally when they came from—we were getting people from all over by now. All over.

Elizabeth: So, to elaborate on this can you talk a little bit, Ernie, about the urgency? Just speaking about the theatrical landscape in the US and globally. Can you talk a little bit more about the urgency of developing and channeling new plays into the, quote, “lifeblood” of theater as an art form?

Ernie: The writers’ strike gave you a good example of what this is about. There was no productions without the writers. You could do productions—you could find actors, they are a dime a dozen. You can find actors, you can’t do anything if you don’t have the play. If you don’t have a script. So they got their contract way before the actors did. And they got a great contract. See? So what that shows you is playwrights are the core. Really the core.

So, developing a play is not easy. Playwriting [00:39:00] is really hard. It’s really hard. You, first you have to find someone with some talent. They don’t have to have great talent. You don’t have to have an Edward Albee. And I wouldn’t want an Edward Albee, but you didn’t want an Edward Albee. Or an August Wilson, who was the great playwright of my lifetime. But you, they had to have some talent. So you would, you could spot that. Lloyd could always spot it. She was nasty about it, but she could spot it. I could always spot it. And then they had to have a certain personality. They had to be ruthless because you wanted your play done and you wanted your play the way you want it done, but you wanted it to reach an audience and to touch an audience. So you had to be ruthless. You may have made cuts, you made cuts. If you had to make adaptations, you made adaptations, you made it, you’ve got to make it work. Some, a lot of people don’t do that.

Michael: You mean, so the playwright had to be ruthless with their own work?

Ernie: Yes, yes. Absolutely. Absolutely. And—unless you’re brilliant. If you’re an August Wilson, he never did learn how to write a play. But [00:40:00] it didn’t matter. He was August Wilson. Everything, all his actions are offstage for Christ’s sake. And yet he wrote Fences. Fences. Jesus Christ. What a great play that was. Seven Guitars. Jesus. The taxi cab play. Jesus.

Elizabeth: The whole 10-year cycle that he did.

Ernie: The last one stunk but he was right. We got it about August Wilson, but he it didn’t matter that, actually, once those people opened their damn mouths, it was amazing. So you, when you had that kind of talent, you could get away with a lot.

But it, but most playwrights don’t have that. I never had that much, I never had anything near that talent. I could do characters, that’s what I could do. So you had to learn, they had to learn, they had to be ruthless. They had to learn how to write, and they had to want to get it in front of an audience and they had to want to get their play in front of that audience, their way. That’s hard. The process is getting them to, they have to have experience. In other words, they need to know what [00:41:00] a director does. They need—it doesn’t sound right. You, we all know, we’re in the theater, but these are people who knows if they’ve even been to theater. Say they have, but they don’t know what a director, they have an idea what a director does, ’cause in the movies, the last line before the movie starts is “directed by.” That’s all they know. Actors. Actors! Some people think that these actors don’t even, aren’t even saying the lines that are written. They really do! They came in and they go, “I just thought they were just talking.” I’m going, “Are you kidding me?” Really! And they had to know set designers. They had to know, they had to know what a process was. They had to learn theater.  Theater’s not like film.

In theater—I’ll give you an example of the difference. In theater, when you sign a contract in theater, you have the last word on everything. On every word that’s spoken on the stage. Every word.

Elizabeth: You the playwright.

Ernie: And you’re the playwright. You have, if they want to change a line, a word, they gotta [00:42:00] come to you and say, “We want to change this word. Will you let us do it?” And you could say, “No!” And they can’t do it. In film, you sign a contract, and you have no rights whatsoever.

Michael: They can change the whole story!

Ernie: They can ask another writer to write another version. They usually do. By the fourth or fifth person that’s written it and adapted it, it gets done. And maybe you get credit, maybe you don’t. It’s completely different in film. Film, it’s the director. In theater, it’s the playwright. It really is.

Elizabeth: Speaking of playwrights, I want to talk to you some more about your prolific output as a playwright. We’ve talked about Hagar’s Children and some of your early plays, but as you mentioned before, you’ve written 69 plays, and in this wonderful article in the Washington Post you said that your plays are divided into, quote, “family plays” and those with, quote, “social relevance.” To play devil’s advocate for a minute if [00:43:00] indeed, as second wave feminism declared, the personal is the political, can you talk about what distinguishes a family play from a play with social relevance?

Ernie: Only one thing, for me. My family plays were written about real people that I knew. And I could fictionalize it a lot. Sometimes. But it was my uncles, my mother, my aunt, my, those people, my sister, my grandfather. And the plays that were not family plays were written fictionalized. They were either from a book or from a personality or, usually it was a person. Any one of them that I wrote would always be a person.

I think that there’s social relevance in all of them. It’s just that the difference for me was that I was writing about real people and fictionalizing them, so I had, that was my core of what I had. And the other ones were completely fictionalized. I might have had a book or research or something. When I wrote about Pope [00:44:00] Pius IX, for instance, I went to Catholic University. Where else would you go? I had good friends at Catholic U. And here I was, Mr. Jew, and me, I said, “I need to find books about the Pope Pius IX.” And the guy said, “Oh….” And they had a big library, and it was one of these old libraries had these shells in a dark down three floors. And I’m down in the dark and there it is. They have, it had to be a seven-foot shelf.

Elizabeth: Wow.

Ernie: Of books. About Popes.

Elizabeth: Oh, about all the Popes.

Ernie: All the Popes. And Pope Pius IX was a lot of books. A lot of books. And so I, so that kind of thing. I did that research on him. I was fascinated by him. Totally fascinated.

And it was always a question, when I was writing about my family that was one thing and some of it was that way too, ut when I was—because these were ordinary people, I loved writing about people. People think ordinary people are ordinary, but they’re not. They’re not. Not—my family is [00:45:00] completely ordinary people, but I found them absolutely fascinating. I wanted them to be fascinating. I also wanted them to be Jewish, which, sorry, I made some of them much more Jewish than they were. But in any case, I loved doing that. I loved doing that.

And I, when I wrote these other plays I was fascinated by a question. I always have a question. In that Pope play, which was a really a good play, it hasn’t been done yet, but it’s a really good play. I love that play. Pope Pius IX was a terrible Pope. He was the longest running Pope there was, except the new one. I, no, I think he’s, he was in there for, God knows, 60 years, 50 years, some long time. In the 1830s, ‘40s, all the way up. And he, during, and it was during a time when there was, the Italians were trying to free themselves. They were, the Austrian Empire had them and France had them and they were split up and everything. But the Pope ran the whole place. And they began to take little pieces of it away from the Pope. And he would lose, so he was [00:46:00] losing Italy to the Italian Revolution. So he was on the wrong side of the revolution. His stuff was, they were all impoverished because they all had, all the Catholics had priests and nuns who were living pretty nice. And they weren’t, and that was that. And the Pope had, they had huge amounts of money. And so, then that began to run out.

So that, I was fascinated because I thought, here’s a guy who did the wrong thing. But when I read about him, he was a very sincere religious man. He really believed he was the agent of God on earth, which you’re supposed to believe when you’re a pope. You get chosen. He got chosen because he was a slow learner. And his mother said you’re not going to be a lawyer, so I’ll send you to the church and you could be a priest. That’s what they did. You be a priest. Anybody could be a priest. You’re going to be a priest. So that’s what he did. So he was not Mr. Smart Boy but he really sincerely believed in what he did. And he made decisions that were, he thought were [00:47:00] God’s decisions. And my question was, how could a man who’s really sincere and a good man do such awful things? And I had no answer, which is perfect for me.

Michael: I assume the play sort of laid out at least something to think about.

Ernie: Oh, it was about a book I read called The Kidnapping of somebody. I can’t remember the name of the kid. And what happened was, it was about, and it was—I didn’t like the title. When I read the book, I thought the title’s wrong because from the point of view of the Pope, it wasn’t a kidnapping. They were saving this kid. They were saving this kid. ‘Cause what they did was this kid got sick at the age of—he was a Jewish kid, and he had a, they had a non-Jewish, a Christian woman who was taking care of the house, and he got, the kid got sick, and she thought he was gonna die, so she baptized him. And then and then he got better, so she said God saved him. And she told him, and the Pope found out about this, and he said we’ve got to make him a Christian. And if he’s under six years old, [00:48:00] they were allowed, in Rome, to take the kid. To take the kid. And they did. They took the kid. The Pope personally took the kid and put him under his wing. And that kid grew up to be a priest. And the parents were going crazy.

So there was a big fight because at that time in the Jewish community, there was the telegraph. And all of a sudden people in America, Jews in America, Jews in Belgium, Jews in France, Jews in England, knew about this. And there was one guy, a very rich man who had been a physician, who had also been a Zionist, had started Zionism before there was Zionism—and I can’t remember his name—my main character, and him and his wife. And he decided to try to get the kid back. And one of the things he did was he discovered, for instance, that the Pope at that point in his life, when they were taking things away, the whole country was going away, all he had left was really, basically he had his little [00:49:00] Roman area.

Elizabeth: Vatican City.

Ernie: He had the Vatican. That’s all he had. And he didn’t even own it. They would rent it to him. So that’s all he had. So he was really running out of money. Except he had a lot of jewels and all that, but he didn’t want to give that away. So he was borrowing a lot of money from the Rothschilds, who would give him money because they said there’s a lot of collateral there. And he is the Pope and it helps us. So this guy went to the Rothschilds and he said, look—there were about six of them, so the one up in Germany, whichever one he went to—and he said we want to get this kid back. And you’re lending him all this money. Why don’t you not lend him the money? Or better yet, it’s past due.

Elizabeth: Oh, collect on the debt.

Ernie: Collect the money. And they said yes. And he was, he still held out.

Michael: Now, you’ve also written several plays that focus specifically on the history and importance of theater within Jewish culture and Jewish diaspora.

Ernie: Yes.

Michael: [00:50:00] Backstage, for example, I think, focuses on lower Manhattan in the early 20th century.

Ernie: And the whatever that is, the theater with the naked women.

Elizabeth: Ziegfeld Follies?

Ernie: Another attempt. The one time I would go to rehearsals, I thought this is the one time I’ll go to rehearsals—

Michael: There we go. Your dreams of Gypsy have come true now.  

Ernie: Absolutely. Never did it, got it done, so I’m waiting, please!

Michael: It’s a historical snapshot of the role that theater and showbiz has played within the Jewish culture and diaspora.

Ernie: Or the other way around. Romania. It started in Romania. And the Jews had they had one little piece of theater that they do, which was during, I think, not, one of the holidays—Passover, was it? No, not Passover. One of the holidays. And it was about Esther, who had married the king, and she was Jewish and the king, she protected the Jews. She slept with the king and said, you don’t want to do this to the Jews. You wanna be nice to the Jews. And he went, okay, sure. [00:51:00] Let’s go to bed again. That was the story. That was, and they would do that every year. And people would be hissing and booing at Haman, his name was. The bad guy. And they would cheer at Esther. And Esther would come in a on a horse naked. She wasn’t actually naked. She had very long hair.

Elizabeth: Oh, this is like Lady Godiva or something.

Ernie: It was, so this was what they did. Then they started—the first people who went beyond that, because that was all the theater they knew, were, they’d go door to door. They’d go to town, and they’d sing. They’d be, like, singers. And then they did little plays, little plays. And before you knew it, that became Yiddish theater. It was all Yiddish. And they went from Romania. And they began to build and they had theaters, actual theater people developing. And this is the 1850s, ‘60s, something around there. And they went from there to France because the Romanians said “Ehh…” and in France they went “Ehh…” [00:52:00] and they went to England and England they went “Ehh….” So they stuck there, but they ended up in America.

And here they were turn of the century America, Yiddish theater. The plays were, there was one great playwright, one really great playwright, but it was mostly the actors who were these, who—and they would do an evening of theater. So it was like songs, a play, a sing-along. And they knew everybody. They lived in this town. They lived right there with them. The actor would go walking down the street, they’d say, “Look who it is!” And they all knew, and then they would be there for four hours. And they would be eating pickles and stuff. That’s really what was going on with this. That was really how it all started. That was Yiddish theater, and it went on for 20 years.

A vital part. People that came out of that were composers. So you had Irving Berlin came out of that. The Gershwins came out of that. Because Yiddish theater, they did music, they did this, [00:53:00] they did that, and the audiences were completely involved with them, and eating at the same time. So the actors, people like, oh, I can’t remember them all. They came, all came out of Yiddish theater. The early actors, Edward G. Robinson was a—you’d never know he was Jewish. Only to look at him, he’s got to be Jewish. But, John Garfield. Muni, Paul Muni came out of Yiddish theater. All of them had been in Yiddish theater at one point or another and they all came out of it. It was an incredible influence on the—some of the best playwrights were people like Clifford Odets, Jewish, and he came out, he was from this tradition. And he wrote a play Street Scene, and he wrote a couple of plays about the Jewish people. And so, there was a ton of people. You go all the way through, even today. Not today so much, because they got less Jewish.

Michael: Do you think the stylization of Yiddish theater influenced your plays at all?

Ernie: Yes, unfortunately, sometimes, it [00:54:00] was difficult. No, Yiddish theater was stylized. No it didn’t influence me. I, the tradition of Yiddish theater was important for me. I, especially, I read, Miller came out of, not Yiddish theater, but he came out of Jewish theater. When he wrote that play, Death of a Salesman, the guy was Jewish. We all knew Loman was Jewish.

Elizabeth: Willy Loman, yeah.

Ernie: He wouldn’t say it because he wanted to have an audience, Arthur Miller was Arthur Miller. But everybody knew the guy was Jewish. He was a salesman for Christ’s sake. He was a shoe salesman! Excuse me! You know? And so I was very influenced by Arthur Miller. Very. And that’s because there’s a whole tradition from all the way from people, Odets and even earlier than that, all the way up, playwrights left and right who were wonderful playwrights, not always first-rate playwrights like Arthur Miller was, but they were wonderful playwrights and even later on there were some great playwrights. It had, they had an enormous influence. Yiddish theater, I think, emphasized [00:55:00] the actors a lot. Because they made them stars.

Michael: You must have had quite a few reviews written about your plays over the years. So, I wanted to shift focus a little bit and talk about the relation between the playwright, the new play, and then the reviewer. I wanted to quote you I think you gave an interview at one point where you said that “reviews are important for your reputation and for your ego, but they are absolutely unimportant in telling you what’s right or wrong about a play.” So can you just speak about the disconnect between the sort of critical response and the quality and artistic rightness of the play?

Ernie: First of all, they’re not critics, they’re reviewers. There’s a big difference between a critic who writes for The New Yorker and has some experience and a reviewer in Pittsburgh who may not have got out of high school. The best writers in the Washington Post were in the sports section. They still are the best writers. Lloyd Rose was a reviewer [00:56:00] for them for ten years and she was wonderful. But she was really different. Dave Richards was nasty as hell. Not as a person, he was a very nice person. But boy, he was nasty. He wrote a book about one of the playwrights, and it was so boring, nobody would publish it. But that was Dave Richards, and he was one of the not such bad critics. They really, you don’t know who the hell is going to be a critic. In some town like Denver, or somewhere like Chicago, or, well, or New York, there’s 20, 30 reviewers. Who the hell knows who they are? So for me, I stopped reading them. What I would do is Elaine would read them and she’d say, “This one you can read.” I didn’t want to read the bad ones. I just, they didn’t do me any good. And that wasn’t going to, it wasn’t going to influence whether the play was good or bad. I did the best I could do with the play. I wrote the play. I knew how good it was, if it was good, because I could tell from the audience that it was good or not good. I didn’t need a reviewer to tell me. I could just tell by look. If I wrote a comedy, if I didn’t get a laugh here and there, I knew it wasn’t going to work. Now, on Saturday [00:57:00] matinee, that’s a different matter. People were 90 years old on Saturday matinee. So they fell asleep, but most nights, if I’d go, I could tell. So I stopped reading any reviews.

Michael: So your best reviewers were the audience and their responses.

Ernie: Yeah, you can’t because you don’t know what, you even get good reviewers. I’m not saying that they’re all bad, but you don’t know what the hell you’re getting from them. You don’t know what their background is You don’t know why, you don’t know what they know or not. You don’t know whether they can write well or not.

Michael: That was, that loved new plays or wanted to see them—

Ernie: Well, there was a reviewer that reviewer—can’t remember his name, he was an older guy—and he really, Harry and him got along really well. I don’t mean in that, but I mean they got along. He just liked Harry. And he, and the theater, New Playwrights’ was very interesting to him. I can’t remember his name.

Elizabeth: Is this Richard Coe?

Ernie: Richard Coe.

Elizabeth: Richard Coe, okay.

Ernie: Richard Coe. So Richard Coe went to see these damn musicals by Kenny and Timmy. [00:58:00] And he was going, “Jesus Christ, this is great stuff.” He’d write these great reviews. And then he saw my play, and he liked me, and he wrote a great review. He was on the, he was the main reviewer, the only reviewer really on the post. And he helped New Playwrights’ because he loved their theater. Yeah. Not everything, I don’t mean that he was dishonest, but he would give them the advantage of the doubt. And that helped a lot. That really, because he was the reviewer. There weren’t any, the theaters, now they have 85 theaters. They didn’t have 85 theaters back then. And they didn’t have five and six reviewers. Lloyd brought them all in. They had, it was, Peter, it was Coe. Richard Coe.

Elizabeth: I think he was critic emeritus even for years.

Ernie: For years. He was a wonderful person. Oh, he was wonderful. He was great to me.

Tremendous thanks to all our listeners. To those of you who are free subscribers, please consider becoming paid subscribers so that Creativists in Dialogue can continue bringing you insightful conversations about creativity from Washington, DC, and beyond. Thanks.

Special shout out to Creativists in Dialogue’s production team: Audio engineer Elliot Lanes, social media manager Erin Dumas of Dumas83, and transcription editor Morgan Musselman. Thank you all.

For more information about Creativists in Dialogue, please visit creativists.substack.com or our Facebook, Instagram, or LinkedIn pages. To learn more about our other projects, please visit elizabethbrucedc.com or rmichaeloliver.com.

The Creativists in Dialogue podcast is supported in part by the DC Commission on the Arts and Humanities and subscribers like you. The Theater in Community podcast series is supported in part by Humanities DC. Thanks.