RobertaIn part one of our Theatre in Community interview with Roberta Gasbarre, we discuss her early experiences with creativity, her work with Robert Alexander at Living Stage, and finally, her work at the Smithsonian’s Discovery Theatre. Part two begins with Roberta’s involvement with the Washington Revels. Our conversation then shifts to exploring Roberta’s approach to creativity, community building, and teaching.

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 the extraordinarily talented and versatile theater director and producer, Roberta Gasbarre. To quote from her bio, “Roberta Gasbarre is artistic director for Washington Revels as well as stage director for the annual Christmas Revels. A recognized leader in arts-based learning; her primary interests are in mixed forms, new works, large community celebrations, chamber musicals, theatre for social change, heritage arts, and theatre for young audiences. From 1999 to 2022, Roberta also served as a Museum Theater Specialist and Director of the Discovery Theatre for Smithsonian Associates, writing, directing, and producing over 350 performances for 50,000 people each year; touring shows, school residencies, and shows on the National Mall. She also worked, briefly, for the Office of the Undersecretary of Education at the Smithsonian, creating multicultural educational modules for early childhood classrooms in Nebraska with a cohort of Nebraska teachers and Smithsonian educators. Shortly after her retirement from the Smithsonian, Roberta accepted a position at Montgomery College in Rockville as the Artistic Director of the Summer Dinner Theatre program, where she also directed a piece about the Black Plague and the AIDS crisis.

“Her professional credits include work at most Washington DC-area theaters including five years respectively at Arena Stage’s outreach company Living Stage as Production Coordinator, at The Shakespeare Theater as a choreographer and movement specialist. Her work has been Helen Hayes nominated numerous times and two of her productions have earned Helen Hayes awards: A Dance Against Darkness: Living with Aids—she was co-director—and Quilters where she was Associate Director and Choreographer. Roberta’s choreography, movement work and directing were seen at such venues as Roundhouse Theatre, Woolly Mammoth, and the Washington Jewish Theatre. Fluent in sign language, she also worked on the faculty at Gallaudet University and was on the leadership team for the historic world conference and festival, Deaf Way I.

“Roberta has taught acting, movement and period style in workshops or classes at such institutions as American, University of Maryland College Park & Baltimore, Wolf Trap and through Kaiser Permanente’s AIDS and health education initiative. She loves working with young performers and has done so at George Washington University and at Montgomery College Rockville and their Summer Dinner Theatre program.

“Roberta received her BA from the Catholic University of America and MFA from Towson University, specializing in interdisciplinary world theatre. She lives in Silver Spring, Maryland. She and her late husband Oran Sandel have two adult children: Son Jamie is a musician and also works in video, photography and sound; and daughter, Caelyn, is in the video game industry, writing, coding and performing interactive media in Boston.”

Welcome, Roberta.

Roberta: Oh my gosh. I’m blushing!

Michael: We like to start at the beginning of a person’s creative life. So, if you could tell us some of your, maybe one of your early experiences of creativity of any kind, either as a witness or as a participant.

Roberta:  Of course. We know that creativity starts before the child is even born. And I will tell you my earliest memory is standing, because it was in the ‘50s, between my mother and my father with my arms outstretched over them in the car singing “Honey Bee” at the top of my lungs with my father. [00:04:00] I knew all the words and I must have been about three.

Elizabeth: Wow.

Roberta:  Then by the time I was seven, I was directing my cousins in shows in the kitchen, with stuffed animals and yardsticks and hats. And I knew from a very early age that I just, it was what I did and who I was. That’s young, but I think that’s why I can look at a child and say, “Oh yeah, bundle of creativity. Bundle of creativity.”

Elizabeth: Right. Roberta, remind us of where you are from and how you got formally involved in theater.

Roberta: Oh my gosh. I’m from Grand Island, New York, outside of Buffalo. And I have a story, a short one, that I was in a dance studio at five. My teacher was Mickey DeFiglia, better known as Michael Bennett, as a teenager, and we followed his early career as he started to do touring. [00:05:00] And then when I left and went to New York City, I ended up auditioning for him for A Chorus Line in ‘76. But Grand Island, very tiny island between Niagara Falls and Buffalo, and I studied dance at Ferrara School of Dance, and did theater with the theater group, and then at school and high school. So, small town. I’m a small-town girl and I used to take the bus to Niagara Falls to take tap and jazz. But, yeah.

Elizabeth: Very cold.

Roberta: Yes! It gives you an appreciation of cold wind because we had it all the time.

Elizabeth: I think it’s one of the coldest places in the country.

Michael: So, let’s go back years—maybe it’s 40 years, maybe it’s more, maybe it’s less—anyway, but to one of your earliest theater enterprises, and that’s your involvement with the Living Stage.

Roberta: Yes.

Michael: Which was a project of Arena Stage and was founded by Robert [00:06:00] Alexander. You were one of the earliest people involved with the Living Stage. And your late husband, the incredible theater artist Oran Sandel, was with the Living Stage for 25 years as a core company member and then as co-artistic director during the company’s last chapter. Can you tell our listeners what the Living Stage was, how it began, and what its vision and mission were?

Roberta: Living Stage was founded by Bob, Robert Alexander, as an interactive theater event. It was meant to bring out the creativity of the audience, not the actors. And really all of the people in the room, including—I was a production person, I started as a Production Assistant and became Production Coordinator— everybody in the room was there to foster, encourage, and celebrate the audience’s creativity. So, it was an improv company based on [00:07:00] Grotowski methods, what was later called Boal.

Elizabeth: Oh, Augusto Boal.

Roberta: Yeah, but not, Bob always riled at that because he was before Boal. He goes back to Spolin, Viola Spolin, who was working in the tenements in Chicago with poor folks, poor kids, poor adults, and created this improv for the theater technique that we, that Bob, we said we followed it but Bob really veered off into a more ritualized theater, where a scene could start but it would be interrupted by a poem that somebody else would jump up and say that expressed the inner life of the character on stage. Or a scene would be happening and then—improvised scene would be happening—and then suddenly the actors would stop talking and the musician, always on the side with a keyboard and drums, would then sing a song that would [00:08:00] elevate the entire scene.

At a specific point, the audience, be it senior citizens, disabled children, kids from drug houses or inner city kids, or donors from Arena Stage, basically, it was all catholic, small c, in terms of who was out there. We’d stop the action and then one of the actors or Bob would step out and say, “We’ve stopped this scene because we don’t know how it’s going to end. You tell us what you’d like to see.” And then they would give us answers and then they’d say, “Okay, so who wants to do it?” And they would swap out audience members for the performers on stage. The performers on stage saying very close to side coach or support, the audience actors, but oftentimes the audience actors did not need it. They knew what to say. But they would get a piece of cloth or a hat or a set piece or something [00:09:00] and they would complete the scene. And the audiences were then involved in the magic of possibility of theater and by extension the possibility of life because we never know what’s going to happen.

Michael: Years ago I remember there was a book on the techniques of the Living Stage, has that book ever been published?

Roberta: No, it never has. It’s so huge, and I know that Patrick Crowley was doing research a few years ago for his thesis, for a degree. And there have been a few people who have published articles about it, but nobody’s tackled it.

Michael: Interesting. Because the Viola Spolin Improvisation for the Theater is a wonderful book.

Roberta: Yes.

Michael: All the Augusto Boal books are wonderful in terms of just this sort of more audience involved theater, the spectator actor that Boal talks about, so it’s too bad that somebody hasn’t really been able to.

Roberta: I keep hoping that there will be [00:10:00] a coalition of us that get together and talk about our experiences. Because the experiences, the company was so made up of people of strong artistic ability and impulse that each company was slightly different. We were the second company. There was a company that had Oz Scott and Louise Robinson and a couple of other people in it. And then there was a cohort with Susan Tanner, who’s still doing prison work on the west coast. And Ron… I forget his last name—Ron Litman, who now does one-man shows that are rants against the machine. He’s still doing it!

And then there was us, Jennifer Nelson, Rebecca Rice, Rakesh—no, sorry, I forget his name, who has passed—Mark Novak, and myself, and then Oran came in. I was there in ‘75, [00:11:00] Oran came in ‘77, and that was the company that I knew. I actually left in ‘80, but was still family. Oran stayed for years and years and didn’t leave until the early 2000s. But once you’re a Living Stage person, you’re always a Living Stage person. Always.

Elizabeth: Yeah, this resident company, this is a thing of the past, to actually have a resident ensemble.

Roberta: Yes. Supported, I have to say, by Arena. They really supported Bob. Zelda and Tom, Zelda Fichandler and Tom Fichandler who were leading Arena Stage, were very supportive and left us alone to create the theater we needed to create.

Elizabeth: I remember Oran talking years ago about how Bob Alexander, the late Bob Alexander, would be talking to company members and Oran said he said to him, “Look, Oran, you have to think about Living Stage as being your life’s work.” That this is not a pass through. This is a part of your life’s work that you should [00:12:00] consider dedicating years and years. And of course, Oran was there for 25 years, as were others, the late Rebecca Rice and Jennifer Nelson, etc. So, can you talk a little bit more about this extraordinary sense of ensemble on which the whole process was based?

Roberta: Yes. Nobody ever left Living Stage. We take it with us. And also, I remember, I was there for the auditions in New York, which was a fascinating process. Because we’d go up and install ourselves in a studio and see almost a hundred performers over the course of a week and Bob would literally break them. They would cry! And the ones who were just there to find a role would not last. And the people who were left, by the time they had gone through three callbacks, and then were invited down to a callback in DC, he had found the people who “had mission,” [00:13:00] as we used to say. “We have mission.”

When I started out, I was toying with Peace Corps or theater. And when I came to Living Stage, I went, “Oh, this is it. This is, I found it.” And so, all of us really knew we were there to save people’s lives. And there’s a quote that I can’t remember all the way, but all the actors could recite it. It was a very long quote about the importance of art. And so, the importance of art was really to change lives. And that’s why we didn’t do it in a theater for ticketed audiences. Those folks, perhaps they needed their lives changed, but it wasn’t as urgent.

Each company, we spent eight plus hours a day, six days a week, together. Then we’d go home, and even the production people, we were there earlier, and we had a training where we were, like, on the sides waiting for actor or [00:14:00] audience to need something and to feel the need and to support the need with water, Kleenex, markers and paper, cloth.

And so there became this, everybody could finish their own, each other’s sentences. And afterwards we would sit for hours and talk about what happened in the room and what we could have done better. So, what was happening was we were molding ourselves into activist-artists in the deepest sense. And almost everybody who has left has done this work continuously throughout their lives. Even if they’ve been—Ezra’s on Broadway, but right now Ezra is leading the New York contingent of the strike.

Elizabeth: This is Ezra Knight.

Roberta: Ezra Knight, yes. And each one of us has gone on to find that [00:15:00] activism is, leads our artistic work.

Michael: Okay, speaking of, I remember actually seeing, I think one of the few public performances of Living Stage. I can’t remember title.

Elizabeth: I think it was Rebecca Rice’s piece.

Michael: Rebecca Rice was in it.  

Elizabeth: No, I think it was her piece that she had scripted.

Michael: Okay. I assumed that it was developed improvisationally, the—

Roberta: It probably was. Rebecca’s work, she started doing her own work, but she took us all with her, basically. It was all an extension.

Michael: Yeah. So I just remember how intense it was. It was probably a little over an hour and it was and it was an hour of just, like, emotional exhaustion. Anyway, can you just talk us through some of the process that would have gone into, not necessarily that production, but the typical sort of improvisationally created theater piece?

Roberta: Yes. Every morning we’d come in, take our shoes off, go to the piano, and the musician [00:16:00] would have created a jam. And then we, on a theme—for little tiny kids it would be family, sadness. For older kids it would be invisibility, oppression, the hatred of people who want to keep you down for their own sake. That kind of thing. And then the company would improvise a song. Every single morning. From there, we’d come to the center and there would be, if we were creating a piece, there would have been homework on a theme, and everybody would produce their own 3-minute, 5-minute theater pieces that we’d do every morning. So somebody would do a poem, a movement piece, a character piece, and a monologue on a theme. If any other person in the room felt like it, they would get up and join that [00:17:00] person. So, the idea that you improvise on your own or you prepare something on your own could be joined with an improvisatory impulse by somebody else, and then it would change.

So from the moment of creation, we were doing improv work that we as the production team were writing down and later in the process were filming. There are hours and hours and hours and hours of filmed rehearsals someplace in a vault. And we were writing down, and then we would break and talk. And then somebody else would come up and do it. And then there would be lunch and we, during lunch, would hear the notes. And then after lunch, we’d come back and start to format something from what was done. And that process would then be filled out with poetry from what we’d call “The Bible.” [00:18:00] It’s a book that’s about this thick—I have a bunch of them in my basement—and they were filled with poetry and quotes from everybody from Shakespeare, to a five-year-old child, to Holly Near, who was an incredible singer, to everybody.

And the pieces would start to take shape from these improvised segments that were then added to and supported by poetry and song, until you had something that was first, visceral, two, character driven, so you really understood the innards of the character that you were seeing, and that the plot was revealed through the emotional life of the character. And often times for an adult audience, there would be no solution. There would be no resolution. Because that’s too easy. What would happen [00:19:00] would be, you’d get to a stopping point, and then Bob would talk about it with the audience. Because, again, we weren’t creating theater for a proscenium platform, we wanted to engage the audience every single time.

Michael: The process you described would create a text that would take the story, the narrative, the argument, the issue, all the way up to the point of needing a solution. And then it would be turned over to the audience. And the selection of the audience would come—obviously, I guess, you went to various places. Your community was in various places.

Roberta: Oh yeah, colleges and Norway.

Michael: Norway.

Roberta: And every place. We didn’t go to the White House. But we went almost every other platform. Small places, large places, gigantic auditoriums.  

Michael: Did you ever create scripts for specific communities?

Roberta: We did. [00:20:00] Bob, if we were going to do a college tour, we’d create a piece that spoke to that audience. So we were trying to create pieces that spoke to the specific demographic of the places we were going. And it was easy because we were improvising, so we’d start with a theme that would be sometimes driven by things we got in workshops with participants of that demographic. And we’d start there and create a kernel. We never had, I wouldn’t call it scripts. We called it a lead sheet. And the lead sheet had song, poem, ritual, scene: brother, sister, mother, drug addict, father in prison, children have to get their way to school. Then, song. Scene: At school, children do not do well.

Michael: Okay, so even before creating the lead [00:21:00] sheet, you would do workshops with a particular community, so if you were doing a play that dealt with issues in prison, you would go to a prison, do workshops, and understand some of the issues?

Roberta: We were already there. We were already there. We worked for my entire time there, we worked the Lorton Voices, within the prison facility, that was an interesting, I was the production coordinator, so I was the one dealing with the guards taking everything apart and looking in every bag and every musical instrument. But we worked with them once a month, forever. So, we wouldn’t specifically go someplace because we already knew the populations.

Michael: Oh, okay. So, you were basically, alright, so you already knew them.

Roberta: We were embedded.

Michael: But I guess if you didn’t know the population, then you’d have to.

Roberta: Then we’d have to do something.

Elizabeth: So you were in residence, in a sense.

Roberta: We were, yes. We were in residence in many places. We were in residence at Lorton. We were in residence at Sharp Health Elementary, working with disabled young people, children. We were in [00:22:00] residence, we went to Phoenix, and we were in residence at a Deaf set of schools in the Phoenix area. We went to Wilberforce and did a college tour of historic Black colleges. We, yeah, so we were in residence all over the place.

Elizabeth: If you went out of town, you would stay, in Phoenix, would you be there for weeks, or for months?

Roberta: We were, I think we were in Phoenix for two weeks. Three weeks, two weeks. And, oftentimes, we didn’t, we never flew anywhere. We drove a VW bus across the country.

Elizabeth: Oh, right. I remember those buses. It had “All power to the imagination.”

Roberta: Absolutely. Jamie’s company is All Power.

Elizabeth: All Power. Oh, wow. That’s, yeah, full circle. Let me, this is so fascinating. and I, I remember a lot about Living Stage. And I remember meeting Bob Alexander, etc., etc. I even auditioned in New York for Living Stage.

Roberta: Did you really? What year? Was I there?

Elizabeth: I don’t, I would [00:23:00] have been ‘82.

Roberta: Oh, I was gone by then.

Elizabeth: ‘82, probably.

Roberta: Yeah, I was having Caely that year.

Elizabeth: Anyway, I am not a singer, nor am I a dancer. So, it was a good choice not to cast me.

Roberta: But sometimes that didn’t matter. Rebecca Rice was a dancer. And Bob said…

Elizabeth: She also had a beautiful voice and acting presence.

Roberta: Bob said to her, “You must sing.” And she said, “I don’t sing.” And of course, we know that Rebecca sings.

Elizabeth: Of course. Oh, she can bring down the house. I want to fast, move the trajectory along your long and incredible career, but and talk a little bit about your long tenure at Discovery Theatre.

Roberta: Yes.

Elizabeth: Which I think most Washingtonians will know is part of the Smithsonian Institution. It’s housed in the Arts and Industry Building, which I think is affectionately known as the, quote, “Castle.”

Roberta: It’s not anymore.

Elizabeth: Not anymore?

Roberta: They closed Arts and Industry and moved us into Ripley Center, which is a group of classrooms between the Castle and Freer. And we’ve been there—I wish, [00:24:00] they kept saying they were going to move us back. And so I spent my first five years at Arts and Industry. Loved that building. Yeah. Loved, I loved getting children into that building because it was so magical.

Elizabeth: It was magical. Yeah. Isn’t it behind the beloved merry-go-round on the National Mall?

Roberta: It is.

Elizabeth: The allure of that part of the mall. But so am I correct that you moved from living stage to Discovery Theatre and can you just tell us more about Discovery Theatre. What is its mission? What is its vision?

Roberta: It wasn’t immediate. I left Living Stage, had a baby, worked at the TPSS Co-op.

Elizabeth: Oh, Takoma Park Silver Spring Co-op.

Roberta: Takoma Park Silver Spring Co-op.

Elizabeth: Very famous, yeah.

Roberta: Taught classes, choreographed, did stints out at West End Dinner Theatre, was a choreographer, and that’s when I worked with Roy Barber on the AIDS piece in the ‘80s. It was seen there by somebody from Shakespeare Theatre who [00:25:00] brought me in to choreograph for Michael because he didn’t like the choreographer that was there at present.

Elizabeth: Is this Michael Kahn?

Roberta: Michael Kahn. So I came into Michael Kahn’s house. Basically, he said—I said, “Why do you want me? I am not your typical early music period dancer.” He goes, “No, I want you. You did Quilters and you told that story beautifully. I want a musical theater choreographer to tell the story.” So I stayed with him for five years there. Same time, I did Kaiser Permanente and worked, did AIDS work there. Started doing Revels. The Jasters brought me in.

So, I didn’t join the museum world until ‘99. And that was, I felt that I left the theater world at that point. But the option to do museum work, theater and museum, for children, DC [00:26:00] children, was too great. I’d already been creating pieces for them. I started creating pieces at the Smithsonian. I did Anansi and the Wisdom of the World with a griot and a drummer and a dancer. I did Tomte, Trolls & Gnomes. Basically, whatever I was studying or doing at Revels, I would create a piece for the Smithsonian about it for children. They liked it. And so, they interviewed me in ‘99 and I came on.

I felt like I was betraying my theater background, because I said I’d never go to an office or have a staff, and suddenly I had both. And I was like, I didn’t exactly know what to do with myself, but it was a wonderful opportunity. I literally created theater. Brought in Raquis Petrie, brought in Michael Bobbitt, who is now the executive director of the Mass Cultural [00:27:00] Council up in Massachusetts, doing good work, creating, bringing arts to the communities there. Brought in a lot of folks who, to create theater for the audiences that saw in front of me. So the demographic was DC proper. So African American folks, Latino folks, Asian folks. And so I started to create theater for those folks with young artists that represented them, because I wanted them to see themselves on stage at the Smithsonian, doing plays about history and science, that reflected their history. And it was very exciting to do. And I got to work with a lot of young, fantastic performers.

Michael: And when were you a Fulbright Scholar?

Roberta: Okay, so that, I have to say, somebody published that a million years ago, and it just keeps coming up. I was never a Fulbright Scholar! I went on a Fulbright tour of Central and South America in [00:28:00] 1970. It was almost before the Fulbright program had gotten solidified. And through Catholic University I toured Central and South America and did, we worked, literally, in barrios and in town squares and dust-covered streets. We sat up in the middle of a street and performed. It was awesome.

Michael: And did you do a residency in Poland at all?

Roberta: I did! I did that.

Michael: Okay, you did that.

Roberta: Also, yes, I was at University of Poznań. And also did a play there. But we were doing culture and theater. And teaching at the university. And that was all in my twenties when I was young and footloose and fancy free. No children.

Michael: So all that was before Living Stage.

Roberta: Yes, all that was young.

Elizabeth: Okay, yeah, rewind the videotapes. Speaking of rewinding videotapes, we recently interviewed your good colleague and our colleague, Lynnie Raybuck, who I’m sure has worked everywhere across the theatrical [00:29:00] landscape of metropolitan DC.

Roberta: She sure has.

Elizabeth: And Lynnie talked about the Smithsonian Puppet Theatre and Bob Brown’s marionette puppets. Can you share a little bit of this history about the role of the puppets at Discovery Theatre?

Roberta: Yes! Yes, you know what, because that theatre was Discovery Theatre. So they started out as a puppet theatre on the mall in a tent. And graduated themselves into American History. And two weeks before they were supposed to open, there was a fire, an electrical fire. They lost everything. So they closed. And when they reopened, they put them into Arts and Industry. And they called them Discovery Theatre.

Depending on who you ask, the theater was founded in ’66-67 or ‘68 or ‘69. Depending on where you hit, where you think the Discovery Theatre actually started. On the tent? American History? Or when they finally ended up in Arts and Industry. So it [00:30:00] was first and foremost a puppet theater and we did the best we could to keep the idea of puppetry and traditional arts alive all through my tenure. So we would bring puppets in. Heidi Rugg from Virginia. We would bring in puppets from all over the country to perform in our little theater on the Mall.

Elizabeth: I wanted to ask you about your, this process at Discovery Theatre of engaging both performers and companies from all over the place.

Roberta: It was two tracks. The first was, yes, bringing people in. I brought Native American dancers in, and I brought Maasai warriors in when they were touring. And I brought Kareem Nagy, Arabic drumming, and Chinese puppetry, and Asian shadow puppetry, and, so I would bring in different groups, and they would drop in as guest artists and do a couple of days.

The second track [00:31:00] was that I was training young performers in museum theater, which is a specific—especially how I developed it at the Smithsonian—is a specific way of creating theater and doing it, because the plot doesn’t really matter, the character development. Oftentimes you’re taking people from history, so there’s your character. You’re taking an event from history, there’s your plot. Or you’re elucidating some scientific principle. Mother Earth and Me was about natural sciences. And the actor comes in and they’re trained—I developed a technique from the Shakespeare Theatre, working with Ralph Zito and a couple of other, Liz Smith from Juilliard, where you’re really working with the key words and grammatical markings to make sure your audience understands what’s being said. Took that from classical theater and moved it into museum [00:32:00] theater because you have to get the audience in 45 minutes to understand your topic. You want them to leave humming the topic. You’re really writing and acting very specifically as a teaching method.

I would bring in young performers, a lot of young performers of color, and would start them and say, “Okay, so now you’re going to learn how to speak ‘museum speak.’” And they would research. And they would actually be able to speak off script. So if a child asked a question in a theater, in character, the actor would leave the script and converse with this person in character and answer their question. So, we did Mothers of Entrepreneurs, Madam C.J. Walker. What did I call it? “Lions of Industry, Mothers of Invention.” And it was about Madam C.J. Walker, first African American female millionaire, Booker T. [00:33:00] Washington, George Washington Carver, other folks who were entrepreneurs and inventors. And these characters would create an exhibit with the kids holding posters of Carver’s inventions and then talk to them about it. It was always interactive. It was always a conversation with the audience. Oftentimes, the teachers would come out saying, “I learned something.”

45 minutes, fast, fast, fast. And working with kids from every demographic. And wanting to make sure that all of them came away thinking that the Smithsonian was their home, their place. They owned it. We would say this, the house managers would say, “You own the Smithsonian.”

Elizabeth: Yeah, it’s true!

Roberta: And the kids were like, “What? What? What?” And he’s, “Yeah, you do.” And so, bring your family back, it’s free. And so we were actually wanting to create a community and oftentimes [00:34:00] kids who started at the Discovery Theatre would become avid museum goers or interns because they remember that the Smithsonian is their place.

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