In part 2 of our Theatre in Community interview with Ernie Joselovitz, we discuss his founding of the Playwrights’ Forum and his 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: Speaking some more about you, Ernie, moving forward through your illustrious life you founded what in DC is the [00:59:00] legendary Playwrights’ Forum, which I think was originally called the Playwrights’ Unit. And for 36 years, you guided the development of hundreds of area playwrights and their plays. Playwrights’ Forum was uniquely your own. You knew everyone’s name and only one person besides you ever taught. So, it was never big. It was never expensive. And you’ve mentioned you’ve never turned anyone away for lack of funds. The idea was what do playwrights need to be able to write the best they can.

Ernie: Right.

Elizabeth: Again, you retired several years ago and dissolved the Playwrights’ Forum, though there was this fabulous tribute to you at the Imagination Stage that was attended by a veritable who’s who of Washington theater.

Ernie: Dana Vance. Oh, boy! Not bad looking at the age of 50.

Elizabeth: Anyway, can you revisit the genesis of Playwrights’ Forum for us and talk about that?

Ernie: Oh, sure. I’ll try to make it short. Harry had a class, Introduction to Playwrights, and that’s the class he had. So he kept doing Introduction to Playwrights, and I said, [01:00:00] “Harry you’ve done Introduction to Playwrights five times now, and you have the same people half the time, they keep coming in, and you keep introducing playwriting to them. You gotta have something like maybe, not Introduction to Playwriting, maybe a thing called a unit, let’s call it a unit.” Which was what ACT was doing. And so, I said, “Let’s call it The Unit. And I’ll have these people come in. We’ll pick some people, 13 people.” And we brought them in and they would, I was teaching playwriting to them.

And Harry had a book by some guy, I don’t know who it was, a how-to book. And I didn’t know how to teach at all. I didn’t know what the hell I was doing. I never knew what I was doing. And I read that book and it had a vocabulary. A vocabulary about the structure of a play. So it wasn’t a matter of, I like your play, I don’t like your play. It was a matter of, who’s your protagonist? And I would start out with that sort of stuff. What’s the conflict here? Who’s your protagonist? Ba da. And that way, you didn’t talk about [01:01:00] personalities, you didn’t talk about good or bad, you talked about stuff. About structure. What do you mean to be doing here and how can you do it better?

Then when Harry left, I left. And I took that with me. I asked Harry if I could do this. I said, “Harry, let me take The Unit and make it my own organization. I don’t want to steal this from you if you want to do it.” He said, “I don’t want to do it.” And so I took it and I start and it took me years to get it through the IRS and all that crap. Oh my God, did I do a bad job of that. But anyway, I, so I had it. And it was my own organization and I incorporated it and I didn’t have any space. I didn’t know what the hell I was doing.

I was very, I was very good at knowing the problem of a play. I had to learn how to work with a playwright in a patient way and on their own level. That was hard as hell. Because you want to say, “This stinks.” ‘Cause a lot of times it’s stunk. Or you just have to find, what in the hell [01:02:00] can I find that’s good about the play? Is there anything here that I can pick that will help this playwright and push this playwright to the next level?

But what I did, so that, so then I started my own organization. And I had a board of directors, which you’re supposed to have, and I had people on there—I don’t remember who it was—Donna Jardine was on there and a lot of, I had about five people and they were just my board, and I’d, we’d meet once a year and they’d say, “Go ahead and do whatever you want to do, Ernie.” And then they gave me, even gave me donations, which was interesting.

And then I had a board of advisors. That was better. My board of advisors included everybody. Sanctuary. I had every theater was on my board. I’d call them up and I’d say, “Would you like to be on my board of advisors? I’d love you be on—.” Howard. Howard: “What would I have to do?” “Nothing. You don’t have to do anything.” And he’d say, “Sure.” And I’d call him up and say, “I need some free tickets.” Or, “I want to do this new program. Can you help me?” “Sure.” That’s the way. I knew everybody. Keith Parker was absolutely invaluable to me. Howard was invaluable to me. Source Theater with Pat Sheehy [01:03:00] and Keith were invaluable to me. Actors. Just everybody. I knew everybody somehow this way. I guess I—and they had that board that, that committee that they had. Everybody was together. Joan, I can’t remember what her name was, ran that.

Elizabeth: Not the League, but—

Ernie: The League of Washington Theaters, yes. Yes, then we all, and they brought me in. I was a nothing. And they said, “Oh, Ernie, you’re, like, we all know you and you’re like basic for us. So come on in.” And I, then I got to know them really well and I would like, okay. So that was how it started. I didn’t know what I was doing.

So I was teaching, I had one or two groups. And I thought, I’m going to have, we’ll read little scenes. And then I said we need to do a reading. I started doing readings, in-house readings. And then I started doing public readings. I had to find space, so I would call up National Theatre, and I’d say, I, Rachelle Raphael was over there, my wife is there, and I said, “I need a space.” And she said, “Sure. You can [01:04:00] use—Helen Hayes—the little area up there, you can use that, and what’s his name will be done, so just let him in the door.” Nothing, no money. I was—Catholic University, my God, the guy, Roland Reed, oh, I, so I knew everybody.

So then we did the readings. Then I said, okay, what else do we need here? This is good. I said, I, there are these people that don’t know anything about production. They’ve never had a production in their entire—I had, anybody could come in. I mean, they didn’t know anything. A lot of people didn’t know for nothing. And so I would say, okay, I need to have these people, when they’re ready for it, to sit through a new play, the whole rehearsal process and everything, so they see what, how it all works. So then I called up Howard. “Howard, I need a, can you have some people, a guy come in and sit there during your rehearsal of this new play you’re doing?” And he’d say, “Sure.” And then he sent me two pages of rules. They have to sit in the back. They can’t [01:05:00] applaud. They can’t laugh. If I tell them to leave the scene, they gotta leave. They can only come here. And so he said, so that’s how I thought, okay, I had Howard, it’s great, they’ll do it. I sent this, I sent these, I sent a lot of them over there for this new play and they were sitting there watching this and after two weeks they were like buddies. They said, “Oh, this is an observer. He just, he’s awed by us. He loves our actors.” He loved it. It’s all new to him. And they all love the guy. And that’s what, every time, two weeks would go by and it would be like no rules. No rules, no nothing. And Howard was, so that, I did that.

Then I decided that they needed a newsletter. So, a newsletter, yet, a hard copy newsletter, yet, by mail, yet. At that time, who knows how. I had no money. Our budget was $25,000-25,000 a year. That was our budget. So I, a monthly newsletter, oh my god, it would have successes. Somebody got a reading over here. Somebody had a [01:06:00] production over here. Someone is writing this play. And then I’d have, I thought, while I’m doing the newsletter, I wonder if I could get tickets. Because people need to go to the theater and some of them don’t have enough money to go to the theater. In those days it wasn’t that much but even I couldn’t, I understood this. And I wanted to encourage them. Because the more they went to theater, the more they learned. So I got, I called all these theaters up. And I said, “Do you have any free tickets?” And they’d go, “No.” I said, “Do you have any pay-what-you-can tickets?” “Oh, sure. Sure. I’ll give you some pay-what-you-can.” And I had a newsletter. We’d have all these tickets for these people. So that newsletter every month. Oh my God, I don’t know how I did it. Me and Keith Parker—not Keith. Leon Levinson and me, we put that damn newsletter together. Oh my God. It took us all afternoon to do it and we met, it must’ve been 300-400 people every month.

Then I said, okay, I did that. I did that. I said, I think they need to know about the other people in the theater. So [01:07:00] I would ask a Russell Metheny to come over. I would work with Russell. Before I wrote a play, I’d go to Russ, I’d say, “Russ, I got this play, I don’t know what the hell, I can’t see it, I can hear it, I can’t see it.” And he’d say, “Okay, tell me about the play. And give me some dialogue.” And I’d give him the dialogue, he’d read the summary, and he’d say, “This play is about chairs.” I’d say, “What the hell do you mean?” He’d say, “It’s about chairs.” This is the Pope play. He’d say, “That Pope sits in a chair that’s 2,000 years old. He sits in a chair that’s 2,000 years old.”

Michael: Sounds like an Ionesco play. “The Chairs.”

Ernie: There you go. I didn’t think of that. And he said, “The Pope is in a chair that’s 2,000 years old. That defines that Pope. Don’t worry about where you are. Don’t worry about windows. Don’t worry about doors. Don’t worry. That’s my work. You just do chairs.” And he’d tell me stuff like that. So I brought him in and I’d give him from these playwrights, three playwrights, I’d give him a little bit of, a couple of little lines of dialogue, like a couple of pages of dialogue and a summary. And he’d come in, and he’d have a blackboard, or he’d have one of those, I bought one of those four by [01:08:00] five paper things you stand on.

Elizabeth: Oh, yeah. Chart paper.

Ernie: So, he didn’t care. So he had his chart, whatever he had. And he started in. He’d say, “Okay, let’s look at this play.” And we’d read the summary. And he’d say, “Okay, let’s start with—.” And he would just dazzle people. Just dazzle people. Because he would say, “Why is this all indoors?” The guy would say “It’s indoors because I can’t go outdoors.” “Why not?” He said, “That’s my job. Leave it to me. I’m the set designer. You write the play. Let me worry about the set.” And they were going crazy.

So, then I brought in a costumer, can’t remember her name. But wonderful woman, wonderful costumer. And she came in with pictures of costumes that she had designed. And she would say, “What do you see here? What do you see here?” And they said—they didn’t know from costumes. They’d said, “Gee, this is green and that’s green.” And she’d [01:09:00] say, “Okay yeah. Why?” “I don’t know.” “And that’s red.” And he’d say, “This is one part of, this is one family. And this is another family.”

Elizabeth: Oh, is this the apple play or something?

Ernie: Whatever, yeah. And then she said, “Okay, here’s a dress. A full dress. And in the next scene she’s got to be in her underwear. How do you do it in five seconds?” They’d go, “I don’t know.” And she’d say, “Watch.” Chht. “That’s it. That’s how you do it.” They were flabbergasted.

And this is what I did. I brought in Mary Hall Surface on children’s plays. She called it plays for young adults. God forbid she should call it children. God forbid we should call her Mary. I loved her, but Mary Hall is Mary Hall. She was wonderful. Wonderful about children’s plays. And so I, as I did that. Then I decided to do a conference.

Elizabeth: Oh, I remember these.

Ernie: An all-day conference. So I started at, the first one we did was at [01:10:00] Paul Donnelly’s house. And Paul said, “Nobody’s going to come, Ernie. Who wants to come and see these theater people? They don’t want to do this.” And I said, “Okay, fine. Use your living room.” Sixty people came. And it was, like, they were, like, on the floor, they were, like, by the door. And so the next time I got, I went over to the National Theatre and they let me use that room in there. And then I went to the, there was a couple of places. I ended up at Catholic U, where Roman Reed gave me the theater, the goddamn theater, it had 600 seats in it.

So I, every year I did a conference and I would have Mary Hall come in, talking about children’s theater, I’d have, I got a guy who had written a lot of plays that were community theater plays. He was from Texas. And nobody thought anything of him. He, but he goddamn wrote, every play he wrote got produced at least once, if not a hundred times. He was the most produced playwright in the country. But nobody knew him, but I knew him! I read him and I said, [01:11:00] “He’s not a great playwright. But boy, he sure knows how to write a goddamn play.” So I asked him, I said, “I’ll pay you to come out here from Texas. And I’ll drive you to the place. Three hours, you can go home.” And he came—Kelly, his name was Kelly. And so I had him. They were like, he would go, I would say, “This guy’s written 200 plays. And every one of them’s been produced! Maybe you can do this.” And he would say, “Okay, let’s just talk about the story. And this is how I start. I’m going to write it in three weeks.” That’s what he would do! He was amazing. So I’d bring in people like that. I had McNally come in. And that was a whole—yes, and I, his boyfriend, somebody got on the phone and got his boyfriend and said McNally’s going to be in town right about that time and he’ll be available to you because he was having a production here. And so I said, great. So then I that morning he was there, he was in town and he said, “I don’t know what the hell you’re talking about.” And I thought, “Uh-oh, I guess that boyfriend’s gone.” And it was going to [01:12:00] be, this was at 10 o’clock in the morning and he was supposed to be there at 12 or 1. And I said, “I’ve got 150 people who are playwrights”—more than I had, more than that—“and they’re all wanting to see you. You’re our guest of honor. Just for one hour. We’ll drive you there. You’ll do what you do and we’ll drive you back.” And he said, “Okay.” And he came. He was wonderful. Wonderful. Because he was so modest. And he was a wonderful playwright. He was a very funny guy. But he was very modest, and so these playwrights were, here’s McNally, who’s, like, Broadway and all of this sort of stuff, and he’s saying, “I just, I write a play and I write. What are you writing?” And that’s who he was. So I did the conference every year. Jesus. It was like—

Michael: You must have developed a pretty large community of playwrights and interested people.

Ernie: Everybody. Yeah. Everybody. I did a, then I won’t go into all [01:13:00] of them, but I also did a workshop. That didn’t work out at all. But there was a guy who was a middleman, an actor. A grumpy actor, too, a really grumpy actor and I was surprised, but I had a deal. I had to make a deal with Equity over this workshop because we’re going to do a reading. We were going to do productions, little minor productions, and I needed, I was going to pay the actors. I had to pay everybody. I spent a fortune, from my point of view, a fortune, that’s over $10. And had to pay the actors. And I was going crazy. So this guy said, “Look, I’ll help you out.” I said, this grumpy actor, he was a middleman between the Equity, between Equity and the actors and the theaters. And he said, “I’ll help you out.” And he said, “Go to that person.” Boom.

Elizabeth: Equity. Yeah. This is the actors’ union.

Ernie: Equity was a bitch. I’ll tell you an interesting aside. I know I’m babbling here, but. One of the most important things that happened in DC theater, which people don’t even know about or hardly know about, and if you’re [01:14:00] not in theater you wouldn’t even understand how important this was, Equity. Equity was all or nothing. Either you were an Equity house, or you were not an Equity house. And that was expensive for a lot, most theaters couldn’t afford Equity. Because you had to do, not only did you have to pay them, you had to have health benefits.

Elizabeth: Actors and stage managers and all.

Ernie: And you had a certain number of people. Much less the music. Oh my god, we don’t want to talk about that whole, that union. But anyway, so they had maybe, the Arena Stage was Equity. And there was a dinner theater that was Equity. And that was it. Pretty well it. Out of 50 or 60 theaters. So, one, a guy came in representing, a new guy came in representing Equity, and he said, “I’m not going to do it that way anymore. We can just start gradually.” In other words, you could have one Equity person this year if you commit to doing, two years from now, you’ll put in two. That changed everything.

Elizabeth: It changed everything.

Ernie: People like Barbara [01:15:00] Rappaport, for instance, she could become Equity and get paid better. So, a lot of people would get to a certain point, Dana Vance was one, would get to a certain point, and they would go to New York. Equity. But, so no older actors stayed that were any good. And then this happened, and they stayed. We had some, Fred Shiffman, a lot of people who are in their forties and fifties stayed. It was an amazing change.

Elizabeth: Joy Zinoman in our two-part interview with her. Joy goes into some detail about this. It’s really interesting.

Ernie: It was a big effect Joy Zinoman! A big effect on Roley. These little theaters, they were fairly moderate-sized theaters.

Elizabeth: Small theater contract. Yeah.

Michael: It sounds like the whole process that you developed at the Playwrights’ Forum happened over time. And you went from basically whatever you were doing at [01:16:00] New Playwrights’ Theatre and then you created The Unit, then it became the Forum, and then you realize they didn’t understand much about theatre, then you brought in set designers and just—

Ernie: I just, yeah, I just, my view, I had a view that they needed something and then I just learned. I just stumbled around doing it.

Michael: And then you even tried the workshop production, which would have been—

Ernie: Which was awful.

Michael: But it’s the logical next step of the project.

Ernie: That’s right. It didn’t work, but yes, I did that. I would try anything just to—these playwrights even when they left they, I would be still committed to them.

Elizabeth: Speaking of playwrights, Ernie, you have worked with hundreds of playwrights either at New Playwrights’ or at the Playwrights’ Forum and elsewhere. And a lot of these playwrights have really soared to regional and national success.

Ernie: National success.

Elizabeth: Including, for example, Alison Curran, Marty DeSilva, Mary Hall Surface, you mentioned, Nicole Burton and Patricia Connelly who founded the Pipeline Playwrights, produced [01:17:00] plays by women, and many more. Including DC’s own Karen Zacarías, who I believe you have told me is currently the most produced playwright in the USA.

Ernie: I think she’s at least one of the top three, yes. She’s getting done. And she is going to go further. She is about, she’s gotta be 50 now. I’ve known her for so damn long.

Elizabeth: Yeah, her kids are, yeah, she has young adult children.

Ernie: I’ve discovered her, I’ll tell ya a little bit of the story. First of all, she’s gorgeous. Mexican, but she’s really, her mother being Swedish, she looks like a Swede, she’s got blonde hair and she’s—anyway, so I was teaching a class at Georgetown extension, a playwriting introduction class. She took it. I have no idea why she took it. She had never written a play in her life. She was a international relations, she had been in college and she had just come out of college and came out here. I don’t know why she came out here. And she took this class. I don’t know why she took this class. And she was sitting in the corner and I hardly noticed her. I don’t know why, ‘cause she was really pretty and young. And [01:18:00] I, but I was busy doing what I was doing and then I said at the end of the day, you gotta write a one act play. They all wrote one act plays and I sat there reading this one play and I went, “Jesus Christ, this is good. Jesus, this is good. Who could this possibly be?” This is about a 40-year-old woman who’s getting a divorce, and she’s playing the piano, and I don’t know where all the—I said, “God, this is nice. It’s a nice play. This person, who the hell could this be?” I thought, I’m looking at my—so I’m passing these out, and I, here’s this 21-year-old blonde, 22-year-old blonde little thing. She’s out of college, and she had never written a play in her life, and I said, “Is this your play?” She said, “Yeah, that’s my play.” I said, “I want you in Forum, too. Free, you don’t pay a dime. Just, please. You can write. You can write.” That’s how I discovered her.

I remember also, later on, when she was, like, having writer’s block, she had her third kid. I won’t go into details. She had three, three wonderful kids, but, in any case, and happily married and everything else. Karen is an amazing person, period. And what a wonderful writer. Anyway, [01:19:00] she was writer’s blocked, and so I said, “Karen,” I told her, call her on the phone. I said, “Karen,”—oh, there’s another thing I did, “Karen you have three kids now you can write a children’s play.” And she said, “I’d never, I don’t know what I’d—” I said, “You can write a children’s play. I’ll get you a grant. I’ll get you a $500 grant at Imagination Stage. You can work at Imagination Stage.” And I went to Imagination Stage, and I said, “I want you to work with Karen Zacarías.” And they said, “Why?” And I said, “She’s Mexican.” Which she was, on her father’s side. They never met her. If they had met her, they would have gone, “Mexican? She’s blonde!” But she was Mexican, half. And so on, so they said, “Oh, a Hispanic play, a children’s Hispanic play. That’s—maybe.” I said, “You don’t have to produce it. All you have to do is just do a reading of it. That’s all I ask you to do, a reading of it.” And they said, “Okay, $500.” Gave the money right then, gave ‘em a check and I called Karen. I said, “You’re going to be writing a play for Imagination Stage. What are you going to write?” She said, “I haven’t the faintest [01:20:00] idea.” So she ends up, they talk and she’s going to write a Hispanic play about that when They hit that bag or whatever it was called.

Elizabeth: Oh, the piñata.

Ernie: Piñata. It was a piñata play. And then a couple of months, weeks later, whatever, I get a call from Katie. Katie’s the one of the ones who was running in that. I knew them from a long way away. I knew them personally. I knew everybody. She says to me, it’s like late at night, she calls me and she says, “This is terrible. This play’s terrible. This first draft, she’s terrible. She doesn’t know what the hell she’s doing.” And I said, “Trust me. Trust me. You sit her down and tell her what the problems are with that play. Trust me. She will write that play for you.” And sure enough, that second draft, they ended up producing nine of her plays.

Elizabeth: Wow. And Karen went on to, she found—

Ernie: She’ll be on Broadway next year! Now she’s doing, secretly doing a, writing the book for the next Disney musical film.

Elizabeth: Is that right? Wow.

Ernie: She is the best re-writer I’ve ever seen in my life. First of all, she’s a hugger. You can’t [01:21:00] resist her. She taught for about a—I can talk about Karen forever. She wrote, she taught for about two semesters for me, the playwriting, the playwrights’ group. And when she left, the guys in the group, she had about eight guys and two women, eight guys, they wore black armbands. They all wanted to marry her. They all, she was a happily married woman, but she was the kind of woman that you wanted to marry. They all, they wore these, they said, “Oh my God, she’s gone.” That’s her.

Michael: “Oh, Ernie’s back!”

Ernie: Or Alison Pruitt. But Karen was just, and she could rewrite and she, what she did was she would go to—I hated rehearsals, she loved rehearsals. So she would do a play, I remember she did a play and it was done here and it was, it was okay, but it was, I told her, “You have a problem here with this play. There’s this problem you have with this play.” And she said, and she she, not only did she rewrite it and get that problem taken care of, she [01:22:00] went, they did a production of it in Connecticut. She went all the way to Connecticut and she was there for the rehearsals, and she did little rewrites to make it local, and for those particular actors. And she does that all the time. They just love her. They all wear black arm bands when she leaves.

Michael: Shifting gears a little bit.

Ernie: Yeah, I’ll talk about some others.

Michael: Playwrights’ Forum, I think, also worked in high schools, if I’m correct.

Ernie: I did, I worked everywhere.

Michael: So yeah, I know you worked at Wilson High School.

Ernie: Wilson. Oy vey, Wilson.

Elizabeth: Now called Jackson Reed High School.

Michael: Oh, now called Jackson Reed?

Ernie: Whatever it was.

Michael: So, can you maybe just reflect a little bit or talk a little bit about the plays that are created by students and the different youth cultures?

Ernie: Yes, I worked with fourth graders at an elementary school. I worked with an extension at Georgetown with whoever came in, but with, and I worked with Wilson. Wilson is, it was another high school I worked at, which was terrible. Wilson was actually not a half bad school. This other school I worked with, Eastern High School, that was [01:23:00] in the ghetto, basically. It was a ghetto out there. The kids, for fun, would beat someone up during classes. You’d find hypodermic needles on the floor. And the principal was never there. I never could find the son of a bitch. And the vice principal was always fucking these girls in the closet.

Michael: There’s a play.

Ernie: But they had these wonderful teachers. So I was doing a workshop there. And, so I did the same thing I always did, I just worked with them like what they could do. And I would start with the, okay, let’s learn the language, write a scene. Okay, let’s talk about the scene. What’s your protagonist? I did all the same stuff I do with everybody. And then I, then they would write a scene. I didn’t have them write a play, they could write a scene.

And the fourth graders, it was hard. That was a little early for them. They didn’t really know much of any, they didn’t know how, they would skip things. In other words, you’d say, “Okay write a scene.” And they’d go, “Hi, Charlie. Oh, don’t hit me.” [01:24:00] I’d go, “Wait a minute. Wait a minute. That’s it?” “Yeah.” “No. You gotta be minute by minute.” Oh, it’s hard. But with the high schoolers they could do this.

And then I would bring in, I brought in Lynnie Raybuck, here we go.

Elizabeth: Yes, I love Lynnie!

Ernie: And Schiffman, not Fred Schiffman, but there was another Schiffman. A Black guy, African American guy. And they, and—the funniest thing—so we, so they came in and they did readings of these plays for these kids. Lynnie was adorable. And the African American, unbeknownst to me, had been, was in a children’s series on TV. He was a minor character but he was an ongoing character. Everybody in that school knew him. The minute he walked in the door, they went, “Ah! You’re on so-and-so!” And he was a teddy bear. He was a teddy bear. They adored him. So we did the reading, that’s how we did it.

And it was, I just worked with them like I work with anybody. That’s it. And I didn’t care if they were good. I don’t care if they’re good playwrights. You work with them at the level they’re at. [01:25:00] And you try, if they want to take this class, I always said with the members, the people that came into the Playwrights’ Forum, I said, “Just wanting to be a playwright deserves respect. You deserve to be respected because you want to be a playwright. You have, you’re either foolish or courageous or both.” So I was with them, they came into this, they took this class or this workshop with me and I said, “You dared to do this.” So, I respected them. Like I do with all playwrights.

And so, one of them turned out to be really good. Really good. And she ended up, I don’t remember what happened to her. She was a, she had a strange goddamn name. Anyway, I shouldn’t have said that. But anyway, she ended up doing Angels in America as a senior. Directing it.

Elizabeth: Directing it, yeah.

Ernie: She ended up working for Young Playwrights’ Theater. That was the Karen Zacarías, among many things Karen did. Karen Evans and Karen Zacarías put that together.

Elizabeth: Yeah, we, Karen Evans, we interviewed Karen Evans and Karen Zacarías about that.

Ernie: Karen Evans knew the school [01:26:00] system and was wonderful. I love Karen Evans. And Karen Zacarías could charm the boots off of anybody. So, between the two of them, she raised a lot of money. And started that. And they got the school. The school was really, you had to really go through a lot of mishmash. With DC schools. DC schools are bureaucracy number one. But Karen knew everybody at that damn school system. And she cut through it all. And then Karen Zacarías charmed everybody and got these kids. And that thing is still going!

Elizabeth: It still is, yeah.

Ernie: I worked for them!

Michael: Oh, you worked for the—

Ernie: Yeah. With these kids at these abused, not abuse,d but these kids at these schools. I worked with everybody. So, I always teaching plays. I don’t know how I did it all. I had the faintest idea how I did it.

Michael: Now, so let’s, stepping back and, how things have changed over the years. You’ve been around for a number of years in the DC region, and you’ve seen how not only has the theater landscape [01:27:00] changed, but you’ve also seen how the playwriting process has changed.

Ernie: Oh, yeah.

Michael: We talked to Molly Smith and the whole, sort of, playwrights unit they have there and—

Ernie: It’s amazing.

Michael: An extensive, sort of, development process and commitment.

Ernie: Wait till she leaves. We’ll see how long that lasts.

Michael: Well, she’s left, and we’ll see what happens. If you could maybe, I would love to just, your perspective on how you’ve seen the, sort of, theater landscape change over the years?

Ernie: A lot of changes. I think let’s just talk about DC now has over 80 theaters. And we, when I was there, you’re lucky you had 40. And they were all pioneers, Woolly Mammoth, Studio Theatre, Source Theatre, they were all just starting out. These are all pioneers and Metro Stage, God knows, Metro stage with Carolyn. God, that was amazing what she did, just amazing. Sanctuary Theatre. All of these theatres were pioneers.

Now, they’re in the second, third generation. And there’s so many more. And now that Equity did its change, they’ve got, what’s going on [01:28:00] now is that they are, there are two or three things. One is, they’re doing more new plays, I don’t know why. And people like Arena Stage, Smith over there is doing just wonderful, she has, Karen Zacarías was a resident playwright there and she wrote her best play there, she wrote her best play there, which is going to go to Broadway, and—now after ten years, it took a while—but and they’re doing co-productions and they’re doing new plays, co-producing at Roundhouse, and I think The Olney, something like that. They’re working together. So, there’s a lot of new developed plays getting done by theaters that never happened before. Harry was the only one doing new plays. Zelda did one new play in her whole damn life did one new play, which was that boxing play.

Elizabeth: Oh, The Great White Hope.

Ernie: Great White Hope. She did that and that was that. Lloyd was over there as, among many things Lloyd did, she was their literary manager. And she was looking for new plays. And it was like picking them out of the field. Zelda just said, “Just [01:29:00] find something.” You can’t. You gotta develop it. She found one! And now she thought that’s the way they all are. No, they’re not like that, Zelda.

The second thing is musicals. It’s absolutely extraordinary. Because what they are doing now is, I remember when they were, nobody did musicals here. They were all on Broadway. Or they were all coming to Broadway. Musicals were all Broadway. Now, somehow, they got some, they worked out a deal where they don’t have to have 16 people in the goddamn orchestra. Shouldn’t have said goddamn. But, that union is just impossible. So, when you go to Broadway, you’ve got to spend $800,000 just to open the play, with, especially if it’s a musical. But what they’re doing now is that these little theaters are doing plays.

I remember seeing—Jim Nicola, who did a, he’s off Broadway, Jim Nicola’s an amazing man, we won’t go into details about this brilliant man, who’s running, who used to run New York Theatre Workshop, which is the best [01:30:00] off Broadway theater ever. And he brought in a play that was a musical that was from a movie, and he got the rights to it and he brought in the director and so on and on. And what they did was, there were eight actors and every one of them could sing, every one of them could play an instrument and every one of them could act and every one of them could dance. And so they did. It was a play about an Irish and Eastern European. And it was a wonderful, it was a wonderful movie. It was a little bitty movie, but it was—and they did that. I went there to see it. First, he had, it was all in a tavern. They didn’t call ’em bars, tavern, ’cause it was from England. And they were in a tavern, and you sat down, it was 300 seats. It’s not a big theater. Jim is just amazing. And the, and they were selling beer, literally selling beer. There was a guy up there selling beer in the tavern. He was one of the actors, but, and then people would come up and buy a [01:31:00] beer. And then some, these people started coming on stage, took a beer, and before you knew it, the play started. And they didn’t have an orchestra. It was a musical with no orchestra. It went to Broadway. But it was much better the way they did it in the little theater. So these little theaters are finding ways of doing plays. Musicals! Metro Stage does musicals all the time. They have two people on the stage, and I don’t know how they, where, how do they, where do they get the orchestra? I don’t know what they do.

Michael: I think Studio did a play just like you’re describing up on the fourth floor, in a bar or something.

Ernie: See? Yeah. Probably the same play.

Michael: Probably was.

Ernie: Because she picked, that’s where she found them.

Michael: I think I reviewed that play back in the day.

Ernie: Yeah. It’s a wonderful little play. Wonderful play. But that’s the other thing that’s going on is there’s a lot of musicals happening here. And they’re all over the country that end up sometimes on Broadway, sometimes not. It’s a revolution of musicals in America. Total revolution. They’re doing plays that are serious plays. I remember when I used to, we used to go to musicals back in the old days [01:32:00] were Oklahoma! which was a dance musical, really. Was, the story is a stupid story. Nobody even remembers the damn story. It was, I don’t even remember what it was, there was a story in there. But nobody paid any attention, the story, who cared? It was dancing. It was just all dancing. The musicals they were doing with Porter or with Berlin, the plots were nothing. There was some of the stupidest plots. I mean there was one they did where they decided that she needed to sing, they had a gospel song, so she ended up being a minister or something for a while, and she did a gospel song. Then they wanted to do a Hispanic song, so she went to Cuba. And this is a big hit! This is a classic, this is a classic musical. Now they’re doing musicals that are smaller. Sometimes they’re big.

Michael: Intimate musicals, yes.

Ernie: Yes, and are serious musicals. Serious topics. So American musicals are just, right now, going through an [01:33:00] enormous an important revolution. They really are. And that’s from theaters from here! From here.

Elizabeth: Yeah, in our interview with Molly Smith, before she left Arena—

Ernie: Oh, she went to the classic American theater, the American musicals.

Elizabeth: But she, she said she thought the American musical was the most revolutionary form of theater, because it got people there to listen to ideas that they would be hostile to.

Ernie: Once they got to those, they didn’t get to those until about the ‘50s. These musicals were about nothing. But you had this gorgeous, you had these great Jewish composers. So, musicals got people into the theater. But now they are doing, they’re really doing. It is really extraordinary. And she’s doing her part. She’s doing classical ones, what she thinks are classic musicals. Why’d she pick Oklahoma! I don’t know. And how she got a, how she got a chandelier in Oklahoma! I haven’t the faintest idea. But she found a way, but it’s not my favorite musical. But it, but it is, there was, she did one that was a small little musical. Wonderful one that I don’t even [01:34:00] remember the name of in it. And Fred Shiffman was in it. Fred is Fred. The son of a, he’s so talented. And it was wonderful. A little musical that she picked out that had been done on Broadway but nobody remembered it. She’s done great things lately. Just done great things.

Elizabeth: Speaking of great things and amazing people, I want to totally shift gears and talk to you about your amazing wife, Elaine.

Ernie: Oh, Elaine.

Elizabeth: You and she have been married for 56 years. She’s always your first reader and you speak of her with such profound love and admiration and gratitude. It’s such an amazing love story, you and Elaine. Switch to a more personal note and tell our listeners how you and Elaine met?

Ernie: Oh, it was completely ass backwards. Everything we did was ass backwards. I saw her, the first time I ever saw her. I don’t remember why. I don’t know why I remember it because it was completely ordinary. She was, I was working at the Beverly Hills Public Library, and I was on the second floor doing the adults. And she was working, she got a job part-[01:35:00] time working in the children’s section, which is downstairs, and it was on my way. I would, they were rebinding books and there was a room down there off of the children’s section where I would walk and I would come in and I was doing all kinds of things there, shelving books. And I was a student. And I came through with these books and there is this young woman chubby, zaftig. We used to use the word zaftig, a little thick, which I liked. And she was wearing a peasant blouse and she looked up at me and made a big mistake, she smiled.

So then I would go find all kinds of ways of getting down there and talking to her. And we got to be friends and for, she had a boyfriend off and on, so I wasn’t into any of that. I didn’t, I wouldn’t know what to do. I dated, I think, I had three women I dated my whole life besides Elaine and I got kissed by two of them. That was it! That was it for me. So I didn’t know what to do. Elaine was [01:36:00] just a good friend.

We would never go on—the first time we went out together was, the SPC, it was a Freedom Riders. Elaine was very, she, we had a lot in common, but we didn’t understand that about ourselves. She was, boyfriend, and I, she wasn’t gorgeous or anything, I just, she, I was very comfortable with Elaine. Very comfortable, because we had so much in common. And she said, why, for some reason, “You come with me.” Because it was down in Venice, I think she felt it was a bad area, and maybe Ernie could protect me. Me, of all people! So, I went with her. So, it was Freedom Riders. They were trying to talk her into going to the South, which she did.

Elizabeth: Is that right? Elaine was a Freedom Rider?

Ernie: Oh, yes. Oh, yes. She was in jail and everything. People got beat up, and this was the year after people got killed. She was down in Georgia, my God, oh, yeah, she sent me a letter from the jail on toilet paper. It was very dramatic. I admired her enormously. I did admire her enormously for doing this. It was very courageous of her back then. 1965.

Anyway, I went with her. And there, we thought there was going to be a meal. There wasn’t. So I ended up buying [01:37:00] her a hot dog. And me, and that was a lot. I had no money. So this was very special that I would buy her a hot dog for 35 cents. And me, so that, I remember that. That was that. That was never a date. That was not a date. Then I went over to her, she helped me move. I won’t go into that. And I went over to her house, cause we both loved Barbra Streisand, and she did her special. So I went over to her house to watch it on television. I had no television. I had no nothing. There I was. And then we went to movies. We both loved Anne Bancroft, so we went to see an Anne Bancroft movie. So that was it. There were never dates. God forbid I should, God forbid I should kiss her! I wouldn’t even, I didn’t even, there’s no way I’m gonna, no way she’s gonna kiss me.

First of all, I was 122 pounds soaking wet. Second of all, I was not a handsome guy, I was a homely guy. Third of all, I was neurotic as hell. And fourth of all, I was dirty. I had to be told, I had a person who really said, “Ernie, you really have to take showers.” This was Mrs. Chaverno [01:38:00] over at the library. “Ernie, you gotta take showers.”

Michael: Best advice you ever got!

Ernie: Yeah, take showers. You gotta comb your hair, Ernie. And those pants, you gotta buy. Those pants are pink. You don’t wanna wear pink pants if you can help it. This is what Elaine had, see. We were friends. And then, she went off. I was graduating, and she went she was, had one more year to go. So I was, how does that happen? I went off to Minnesota to go to graduate school and she came back. She was, I don’t know what I, she went to Europe. She went down south that, the first year. She went down south. That was what it was. And I had encouraged her to do that. She didn’t know what, she didn’t know what she wanted to do. She was at that point, she was right between generations where women were not quite there yet. And yet they were drawn up to be wives and yet they were in a feminist situation. So she didn’t know what to do with herself. She was in school, and she wasn’t motivated. She didn’t know what she wanted to do, what she was doing in school. They wanted her [01:39:00] to get married. That’s what you went to school for. And she wasn’t, this guy wouldn’t marry her and then she, here’s Ernie. So she went down south, and I, it was very, I was very proud of her, and she came back, and I was in Minnesota, then she graduated, and I went to Canada, and long story, and then she was in Europe. So we were, like, but all this time I was writing her letters. I wasn’t good looking, and I was nerdy, but I could write. I could write. And these were not love letters. These were letters that were like she would say, “Oh, I don’t know what I’m doing here. I don’t know what I’m doing.” I go “Elaine, you go to Europe. Go to Europe. You can do this.” On your own, I’m saying. Yeah. I’m saying, “Sure. You go ahead, do it.” She, “Okay, I’ll do it.” She went. So, these are letters that were very friendship letters to her, helpful letters to her. And she would write back to me about what she was doing and everything and I’d take it seriously. And then I would always write a fancy paragraph. A really fancy one. To impress her. [01:40:00] 

So at some point, I was, I came back from Canada. This was during Vietnam, so I was being drafted. So I came back and they did, they were giving me the physical. And I was going to be drafted any day, I thought. I, by this time, I sent her a script of mine, a very bad script, and I, and on the cover, I said, “I think I’m in love with you.” and “I’ve been courting you for a year and a half and I think I’m in love with you, we gotta talk.” She, it crossed. She was in Israel, and she was getting involved with a guy there, and she said, “I can’t seem to get anywhere with this guy. He wants to go somewhere, but I can’t, and I think it has to do with my feelings towards you. And we’ve got to talk.” So, I got on the phone. I’ll never forget it. I got, I went to a friend’s house, I got on the phone. Not my phone. And this is when calling Israel was $2 a minute. We’re talking a lot of money. And this, I didn’t have any money. So this guy was gonna pay all this money. I called up, and this one woman, they had one cable to Israel, and she said, “You’re number five, but don’t forget—” [01:41:00] and she was very Jewish, she said, “It’s Jews. I’ll let you know when you’re on, but don’t hold your breath.” At midnight she calls me up and she says, you’re number one, but, we’re closing the cable in two minutes and it won’t be open again until seven o’clock in the morning. The one cable in Israel. So I set up, so I slept over at this guy’s house. He didn’t know what the hell was going on, this friend of mine, him and his wife. I didn’t, and they were spending all this money on this phone. So then I called seven o’clock and she said, okay, you’re number one. What do you want? I said, I got, “There’s a kibbutz in Israel.” “What’s the name of the kibbutz?” I gave ‘em the name of the kibbutz. She said, “Okay, let me see if I can find it.” And she, this is taking a while. Two minutes and $2 a minute, So she finds this, she calls him up and they get a guy on there and I say, “I want”—I could barely hear them—“I want to talk to Elaine .” And said, “Oh, Elaine, let me look.” This took another two, three minutes. And he said, “She’s out in, she’s picking carrots.” This was January. So in [01:42:00] Minnesota, it was, like, deep winter. In Israel, it was summer. So she was picking carrots. I said, “I gotta talk to her.” And the guy said, “Okay, I’ll go see.” So another five minutes goes, and she comes, she’s on the phone. She gets on the phone and I say, “Elaine, you gotta come to be with me. I’m gonna be drafted.”

Elizabeth: Wow.

Ernie: And she said yes.

Elizabeth: Wow.

Ernie: That was the—nobody ever did that for me. Nobody ever did that for me in my whole life, ever did that for me. So she, then I knew what was going to happen. She sent me a telegram. I had to go to a pay phone to get this telegram, and I had a, I must have had a hundred dimes. And so, I went to the phone and I said, what does the telegram say? And she read it and said, I’m not sure, Ernie, we haven’t seen each other. And I’m in Tel Aviv and I’m getting ready to get on the boat and I don’t know, this doesn’t look nice. And the operator said, “You want to answer? You want to give an answer?” I said, “Yes. How many words do I have minimum? Like how much, I don’t want to—” She said, “Twenty-two words including commas.” So [01:43:00] I wrote her a very, I said, You got to come. Meet your dream. I don’t know. I made up, I made up a whole thing and sure enough, she came out there. And that was it.

Elizabeth: Wow.

Ernie: The first time I kissed her, after four and a half years I kissed her, and I missed her lips. And so right away she knew she was gonna have a problem with me.

Elizabeth: Lothario, you are not.

Ernie: Oh God, it took a while, but she was I, nobody had ever done anything like that for me in my whole life.

Elizabeth: So this, and then you got married?

Ernie: We lived together. Firstly, I was getting drafted any week, but it didn’t happen. I got a delay from my professor to get my MFA, I was getting my MFA.

Elizabeth: Oh, that’s right.

Ernie: And then I had to get a new, then so while that was happening, and she kept thinking, I’m only here for a while, I’m going to go back to the guy. I’m just here to make sure, I need to just get through with this. So I ended up getting, I was living in a terrible little dump. And so, I found a place for her to stay. And I got another job at the library. And I could pay for this place. It was over a [01:44:00] nursery. It’s a nice little place. And she, so then I started spending more time over there. And before you know it, we were like doing it. I won’t even go into that one. What I knew, you could put under my fingernails. I knew nothing. And she figured that out real quick. Not that she knew much either, but anybody knew more than me. So that started to happen.

And then, they didn’t they didn’t draft me until August, I think, or September. But by that time, one of the things I did, once I was finished with my MFA, I got a, I did what Muhammad Ali did, and Muhammad Ali was trying to get out of the draft too, and so he, I moved, we went to New England. To Marblehead, a place called Marblehead. And we had a place there. I don’t know where we got the money. Elaine was working then. I was doing three jobs, getting my MFA, and we had money, and we were staying at this little, so we were, by this time we were living together quite a while and then, but I was being, she wouldn’t marry me. I asked her to marry me about 50 times.

Elizabeth: Wow.

Ernie: 50 times, and she said no. No. First, she wasn’t in love with me. She was never in love with me. [01:45:00] And, but then after a while it got to be, you’re going to get drafted. And we knew a person who got married and he was dead in three weeks in Vietnam. And I knew that I’d be dead. Me, Mr. I-don’t-even-know-how-to-shoot. I got drafted and I went in, and she made me go to a foot doctor. I had terrible, I have terrible feet, really bad feet. And the foot doctor said, “You have really terrible feet. I’ll give you a note. But they’re going to draft you anyway. Nobody’s ever read one of my notes, so you’re going to be drafted anyway. But I’m just going to give you a note anyway, because you’re never going to get through boot camp.” I said, “Yes, I will. Knowing me, I’ll get through. I’m a stubborn guy.”

 I go there, and it’s the last. Anybody have letters from doctors? There was at least a thousand guys from all over Boston, that area. And there were, and I was one of them. And they, I had to take all my, get my underwear. And have my little folder with me that I couldn’t open. And I had my letter. And they started going. They said, “Okay, now get up.” And they were, there were two stamps. There was rejection and a, and yes [01:46:00] and no. And he was doing a lot of yes, you’re going. That’s all he did. And then just as he got me on my feet and he said, “You have a letter?” and I gave it to him and he said, “Oh, this is from some—” like that.

Elizabeth: Oh, threw it away.

Ernie: And then right when that happened, some guy came up and said, “Lunchtime, I’ll take over.” And he sat down and he was a doctor and he took, picked up that letter and he, I think the guy thought it was a podiatrist and so he didn’t know it was, and he read that and he said, “Oh.” And he said he got me to stand on my feet and he said, “Your feet are blue.” And I said, “I know.” He said, “Yeah, how did you ever get through your first physical?” I said, “Hey, I’m not going to answer that question.” And he did this, he took that stamp, this other stamp, and he went chh.

Elizabeth: Rejected.

Ernie: I got out. And so, I got out of there and, with two other guys, there were three of us that got out of a thousand people, three of us. And all on physical, this problem. I got out and I didn’t know where Elaine was going to be. She was going to go to Canada. So she, this was in the [01:47:00] Boston area. So, I knew she was going to be in Boston and I thought she, she’s either going to be on the bus and gone, or she’s going to be in a movie. And if it’s a movie, I’ll never find her because it’s dark in a movie. And I don’t know which movie, or she’ll be in the Commons. So, I think I’ll go to the Commons. Maybe she’ll be there. Sure enough, there she was.

Elizabeth: Wow.

Ernie: In the Commons. So I went up to her and I. And I said, “Elaine, I’m here.” And she said, “What are you doing here?” And then she said, “I’ll marry you.” Right then and there.

Elizabeth: Wow.

Ernie: So we went to Canada after a while, we had to get some money. We were broke. None of us had, we didn’t have any money. So we went to Canada and we got married up there in Hamilton.

Elizabeth: Wow. On that extraordinary story—

Ernie: I know, I’m sorry to make it go, but it was extraordinary.

Elizabeth: It was! It is an extraordinary story.

Ernie: It was all ass backwards. It was really ass backwards. She really, we were best friends. And she never was in love with me, and I was in love with her, but I would, I was in love with doorknobs. I but, I did, I was she was, her kindness is what made me love her. It was her kindness. [01:48:00] And with her, I think it was that I had a real sense of purpose. I was going to be a playwright. And for her, most people, women would go, oy vey, this ain’t going to work. You’re going to make five cents. And what am I going to do? But Elaine was the opposite. She had no idea what she wanted to do and here was me, who knew exactly what I wanted to do. And who loved her. And I think that helped her want to marry me.

Elizabeth: One of the very last questions we ask our interviewees, Ernie, is if they have any tangible, practical advice. You’ve given lots of great advice throughout this interview, but is there any singular thing that you would recommend to our readers if they want to sustain and nurture and really cultivate their own creativity.

Ernie: Well, once you, if you have talent, if you can show that you, if somebody can tell you that you trust, that you, you’ve gotta have some talent. You can’t see people without any talent or you’re gonna be very frustrated and you’ll never get anywhere. But if you have some talent, then the main thing is you [01:49:00] really gotta want do it. You really gonna want. I can give you the, when I was 23 or 21, I took that playwriting class and I knew that I had something. I remember vividly saying to myself, “I’d rather fail as a playwright than be a success at doing anything else.” And that’s what you have to want. That’s how bad it has to be for you. Because it’s hard.

Elizabeth: Is there anything coming up for you other than your own writing? Are you—the Playwrights’ Forum is now just a group.

Ernie: Put to bed. A little group.

Elizabeth: Yeah. Is there anything—?

Ernie: No, I’m writing, I’m doing it. I’ll tell you, it’s, Elaine was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s. A lot of what I’m doing now has to do with overseeing her condition. And that’s really what’s going on.

Elizabeth: Sure.

Ernie: So I have to take on a lot of responsibility.

Elizabeth: Well, you’ve had a long and amazing career.

Ernie: Oh, thank you!

Elizabeth: It has been. It is still amazing.

Ernie: I was amazed looking at my resume. I don’t think I was a [01:50:00] top rate playwright. As I said, I think that, and many—Harry was not a great producer. A lot of, the people that he worked with, people like Karen Brooks Hopkins and Kenny Bloom, became very successful in their own way. Timmy was very successful. He had some really—Lloyd Rose was very successful. But that theater, Harry just didn’t know how to, he just spent too much money. So. he didn’t know the business side of it, but he was a wonderful person.

But I think of myself as a, in baseball terminology, as a Triple-A player. A Triple-A player who had a couple of opportunities to be in the big leagues. And that was me.

Elizabeth: That was you.

Ernie: That was me. But I, I did what I wanted. I did the Forum I ran the way I wanted to run the Forum. Playwriting, I wrote what I wanted to write. And I had some personality problems because I didn’t like rehearsals, I was not charming, and that might have hurt me a little bit. But I think I, as a playwright, I maximized my talents. I had a limited talent. [01:51:00] And I maximized it. And that’s really all I could do. The marketing was gonna happen.

Elizabeth: Sure.

Michael: But you were definitely an essential, sort of, element of the culture of theater in DC. You nurtured it and you cultivated it and you were, I think, you were extraordinary part of that.

Ernie: Thank you. I don’t know how I did it. I, we stumble around. 

Michael: It’s your love of people, I think—

Ernie: I respected these playwrights, anybody that wanted to be a playwright—

Michael: The playwrights and the actors and the theater culture.

Ernie: Oh, I loved the—I don’t think I loved Joy Zinoman, nobody loved her, but I respected her. And I didn’t know them personally. It wasn’t a personal thing. It was just that they were, these were amazing people. Amazing people. And I, and it was like a family for me. I never had much of a family, I never did, and this was like a family for me.

Michael: Because you started off talking about being an outsider.

Ernie: Absolutely.

Michael: And it sounds like you definitely became an insider to this sort of theatrical world.

Ernie: I was, it was like a family. It was like a family. So, I didn’t know them personally. I did know some of my playwrights like Karen [01:52:00] Zacarías and Marty DeSilva and people like that. I knew them pretty well and they became friends. But most of these people that I worked with, Pat Sheehy and people like that. Keith Parker was a very good friend. But most of them, I just didn’t know anything about them other than—even the playwrights, they’d come in, I had one playwright—I won’t make a big story—but I had one playwright who came in, and he was he was a religious guy, a religious Jewish guy, and he was writing plays about moral dilemmas. And I liked his work, I said, “Let’s do a reading of this play, this one play of yours, a public reading.” So we were doing it. I didn’t know who he was. My God, 150 people showed up. He was like one of the leading orthodox lawyers in the whole damn town. Another guy was writing gay plays, and I knew he was gay because he was writing gay plays, I figured, you’re gay. That’s all I knew about him. And then he, one day I opened the newspaper up and it was on the front page, he was the first gay to get married in DC. [01:53:00] And he was like a prominent member of the gay community. Did I know this?

Elizabeth: This has been fabulous, Ernie. I mean, it’s always great to talk to you, but this has been just wonderful. Thank you for so generously sharing your time and these amazing stories with us, Ernie Joselovitz, whom I call the sort of grandfather of playwriting in DC.

Ernie: Well. Grandfather.

Elizabeth: Godfather, maybe.

Ernie: Yeah, grandfather’s about right.

Elizabeth: Thank you.

Ernie: Thank you.

Elizabeth: Thank you. And thank you to all of our listeners.

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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.