Transcripts For KQEH Charlie Rose 20170901

Communication. The way the play articulates is it talks about that there is a voice inside of your head and that voice is you but you have all these other voices colliding in on it. Voices of your parents, of your husband, of the people in your community telling you what you should be doing. And so she has to stop hearing those voices of other people and hear really if i am left to myself, what do i want for myself. One of the most effective things about the show is the first sort of 12, 15 minutes when you get to meet evan and give his first mono log and give the first song you get to see who this kid is, how deep a hole he is in and how deep a saffier he is, and why he fall foos this lie. Rose funding for charlie rose is provided by the following. Bank of america, life better and by bloomberg, a provider of multimedia news and Information Services worldwide. Captioning sponsored by Rose Communications from our studios in new york city, this is charlie rose. William shakespeares hamlet is one of the best known plays in history. A new production is now running at the Public Theatre, it stars oscar isaac and is directed by sam gold. The two first conceived of the project as students at julliard, production on hamlet will run until september 3rd. Im pleased to have oscar isaac and sam gold back at this table. Welcome. Thank you. Rose how did you at julliard say one day lets do hamlet. I think by doing it at school we decided to do sam was there, as a directing student and i was there as an acting student. And we did all of the hamlet and rosen krats and guildenstern scenes together. I think it was part of your course, right . Yeah, i was studying shakespeare and wanted to work on hamlet. Everybody basically wants to do this play so it wasnt a strange idea to want to do hamlet. Its like the best play ever and Everyone Wants to get their hands on it. And i grabbed os car sort of on his time, the minutes he has down from 24 hours a day as actor training and said on your breaks, would you come down so hamlet with me, well just do the r j scenes. Is that what they call them. They are, you know, usually you tackle, the closet scene or one of these kind of big meals and i thought it would be fun to start with these friendship scenes. And also we were students and friends and it just seemed like seemed kind of appropriate for the vibe at julliard. We did that, yeah, at school. And then after we graduated we kept in touch. We just were always talking about wanting to do hamlet and do some shakespeare and then we finally were able to get some time. And it took about two years of really trying to find a window where we could both have the time to put the play up. And we finally did. That was a 15, almost 15 year process. Like ten years of talking about doing it and a couple of years of actually putting it toblght. Rose what makes it as great as it is . Its bottomless play. You can, you can look at it from a million points of view and each one of them feels like an entire universe. And you think oh, someone else has this other idea about the play when they open up that door. Its another endless, the term poem unlimited is shakespeares term. Poem unlimited. Yeah, it just keeps going. It is a hall of mirrors. You start to look and it reflects it self and has the ambiguity of relige us text where a line is crafted in such a way that it feels like it has infinite meaning. And one of the funny things that sam would say is any question an actor would ask him, the opposite is always true. Any answer that he gives them. It is like the most frustrating play in the world to direct because you can never get to a choice, where you are like this is right. You choose something and someone can always say yeah, but wouldnt the opposite also work. And it does. So its like directing in quick sand. Youre trying to lay some ground work and get some ideas settled. You want it to have a structure and you want it to be functioning but every time you get somewhere you could keep digging and digging and digging, you are digging into quick sand. Few people do the entire tax. Kenneth bran ag did that once. You have got four hours here. Yeah, show its three hours and 45 minutes but we cut quite a bit. I just, i go slow. I have a hard time making it go by real fast. Rose so what was the vision that you presented to oscar that you wanted to do. What kind of story. How did you want to make it contemporary and at the same time bare. I mean the great thing is it really came from us and our friendship and us talking about the play over so many years that it never was like heres my idea. It was always we started a miles and miles from where we ended up. And it was really what was inspiring us, what was moving us, how we were seeing our lives and our seeing ourselves reflected in the play. And when it came time to actually go that production, it was what was on both of our minds. And i think what we were both really interested in at the time that we started getting into rehearsals was the death of the father. That the play starts with the death of hamlets father and about his grief. And the mourning process and the stages of grief hes going through. And that, the idea of a man whose lost his father and the grief sending him into madness was something that i think both of us could really could really see the play through entirely through that lens and do quite well. I think you have spoken to the point that your mother was dying. And you actually read from hamlet long pass ages. And that you were informed by that experience in terms of how you wanted to own the part. Well, we had already had decided and figured out when we were going to do the play which was we were going to start rehearsals in may, november of last area was when my mother was diagnosed with pan cree attic cancer and it happened quickly, and at the same time i was preparing for this, her favorite thing in the world was to see me do shakespeare. She just loved it, she came to see me in school, when i did romeo and juliet, and loved it so much. And so when i was setting there with her first at home and then at the hospital i would read it to her. Ands a was memorizing it i would do the sol il quees, soliloquies, i ended up doing almost the whole play for her. And it was, i guess when i say the religious text, it felt, because there are things in it that feel like parables and particularly a meditation on letting go and grief and death. And so it was very comforting, i know for me and for her too, there was this one section where i read to her about the readiness is all. And if it be now be not to come it will be now, if it be not now, yet it will come and i remember she just was very moved by that and thought thats amazing. And so then as it got worse and in february, she passed. Having the, she never wanted a funeral. She didnt want any of that. So we didnt do that. We just kind of as a family had other own little thing to say goodbye but nie sister came to see the show and she felt like t feels like this is the version of a funeral she would have wanted is to have the space to grief and tell that story about losing someone you love so much, and having this beautiful architecture and this beautiful framework. And this communion with everyone else to tell it. Rose this guy came with a sheer command of elizabethan. Yeah, i mean oscar, its a kind of magic trick where he knows the play inside and out and knows what each word means and how to use each word so well that he can do it as if its contemporary conversation. Its so clear in his mind. Its like, its like when you learn a Foreign Language and you get to that point where you are thinking in the language and are you not thinking in english any more. Thats how he has gotten with the part. And he brings the text alive in a way that is musically very, very beautiful. But also extremely easy to understand and follow because. Rose thats the point, a lot of people have spoken about, in terms of the audience, i think audience members have spoken about as well, it is more comelling for them because they understand it better. I think that a contemporary audience is a lot less used to rhetoric and the idea of speaking verse. And i think its really important to honor the tradition of speaking verse and poetry and giving the audience poetry which has music to it but i think its important not to alienate the audience and to claim that poetry but to find a way that its also contemporary communication. And i like to put a group of people together. You know, we have 299 people come every night and they are all in a room together. And they all, were going to communicate some things about grief and suffering. And were all going to be in the room to experience it together. The communication has to make it to the audience. It cant just be 4 400 year old to poetry. It has it be a contemporary conversation that everybody in the audience is going through. That is something, hamlet says it in the play twice n two different spots. He says the actors are the abstract and brief chronicles of the time. And that the job of the actor is to show the age and body, body of the time, its form and pressure. So thats about now, that the actors role is to reflect to the audience how man is right now in this moment of time. And so for us it was very important to try to strip away as much art i fis as we could. And all that kind of representational stuff. And trying to convince you that we are in else nor and denmark and the medieval times. And the crowns and thrones and all those things and try to find a way to make it much more immediate and relatable. Knowing the history of how many productions have been and continue to be everywhere, every year, did you want to make sure that you did. Yeah, you know, hamlet is this play that is, it kind of, its like a little devil for a director, you know. You have to the ba el with it because every one, every one has, has tried to do their hamlet. And it can really get in your head, that you have to add something to that history. And that is not a very healthy way to approach working on a play. And so for me i tried to not think about any of the productions i had seen, and not think about its history at all. Rose but can you . Yeah, i think, i think because youre in like what branagh was saying, you respond to the speem, you are in the room with so i get in the room with a group of actors and this beautiful language, and you see what happens. And then you just focus on that, what do they have to offer this audience in this moment in this room that were all in. And it kind of takes over. And i tried really hard to just listen to that. I tried to strip away everything else, so i didnt come in, i didnt come in with a concept. I didnt come in with who, you know, like it wasnt i wasnt trying to think about a fascist dictator or who, what is else nor what is rotten in denmark and make some kind of statement about it, i just said where, were in a room, an empty room with an audience and these words and lets see what comes out of our time together. And the essential nature of that, helped me from having to be in too much dialogue with concept or with history. Rose do you have to assume that hamlet went mad because of the killing of his father . No, not necessarily. I think that madness for me understanding it through the lens of grief became so much more relatable. Because grief feels like a form of madness. It feels like it can easily, its such a shock and such a trauma to lose someone you love so much. That on the other side of that, it is a whole new existence. And i think many people that have had to deal with that can feel how easily their mind can get away from them and change. And you see the world differently. And you, you, a lot of pretense falls away. And so that i feel like in some ways in the play is a euphemism for the feeling of grief. Some actors have said after doing hamlet for a run in theater, they have to take off for awhile. It is, it is very overwhelming. The interesting thing which has been so different in such a short condensed amount of time, personally, so many things happened with the passing of my mother, getting married, the birth of my son, that its almost like my personal stakes in doing hamlet and the play lowered. It didnt mean everything to me. It felt more like release than something that needed to be proved or something i needed to prove, you know, and thats a wonderful state to be. Because i think as an actor you always want your personal stakes to be low and the character stakes to be really high because that gives you freedom. And so i think i was able to approach it in a strangely in a kind of relaxed way even though doing all the work. But not overburdens where the personal cost. If you could sit down with the actors, whatever production, whether it was shakespeare or not and say to them, this is what i want you to give me, what would you tell them . Yeah, truth, you know. To me its all, always about honesty and not pretending. Like having the thought, i think thats an amazing thing to watch for an audience is to watch an actor have a thought, so you see the thought that gives birth to the language of the play. And you see that ignite in an actors imagination. And i think the audience just gets so excited to see that. And to see someone not faking it, to see it actually happen. What is that about as an actor . Well, i i think as an actor with an audience it is about sin cronicity. You are trying to sin cronnize with the other actors and people so everyone is kind of moving together and almost unconsciously. And i think when you do have the thoughts and when you are approaching it that honestly, your body unconsciously behaves in certain ways that the audience unconsciously picks up. And suddenly were sin syncronized and moving at the same time together. And i think that is when you really can feel things are alive. But i think it is about working on it. There is so much puzzle solving that we had to do to really, well, well, puzzle solving like, like you know what is, why suddenly go into a soliloquy here. What are we trying to say. What are these long thoughts, what do these things mean and what are we getting toment once those things can be broken down so clearly. Rose is that a collaborative process or singular process. Yeah, we if you take, if you take the idea that the play is not inevitable, like what happens next doesnt have to happen next, it happens next because it happens, why does it happen. Yeah, we sit and come to some, you know, why would hamlet want his girlfriend to go to a nunery. You have to know why in that moment that happens. And we wrestle with that, we really wrestle hard to try to give good answers to those questions that can be enacted. What is amazing with sam and his approach is that even the way he talks about it, you know, its like why are you talking to your girl friend like that. You are really disappointed am are you like oh man, dont act that way, why are you deceiving me. We try to strip a what, weve reverent to the text but were also irreverent by the way we talk about it because we show it enough respect as if it was a real person behind it that made those words that we can just say, what is he trying to say, what is the human thing he is trying to say here. And that, you know, hes got a great bs detecter, sam. You know, he can just kind of call out when you are fronting something or pretending, when you are not approaching it the way you really would. Rose to do this you have to put yourself in terms of the circumstances and the motivation of shakespeare at the time he wrote it. I think for me because most of my career has been in new plays, i work with writers, mostly. Im not used to dead writers. Im used to a person next to me and im like why did you write that, what is going on. So with shakespeare i try to have the same approach even though i couldnt i cant really know what was going on in that guys mind or whether it was really even the guy were calling shakespeare. To me, all of that is kind of nonsense. What is important to me is that i have that conversation enough to be able to get an answer that works for me. And for me, shakespeare was the guy who had just lost his son. And he, and to me he took a existing story of revenge tragedy and he lost his son. And he put his grief into looking at revenge tragedy and saying this is maybe this character cant even get through his own revenge plot because hes in such deep grief. And that idea, that there is a man, shakespeare whose son had really died and who was really as a playwright trying to grap well that grief, whether its true or not, whether if he could get out of his grave and talk to me, he would tell me im totally off base, it helped me stay specific about the world we were making. There is a real person. Hes a person with deep feelings without put those feelings into an imaginary story and we have to bring that story to life. Rose thank you for coming. Thank you for having me. Rose thank you very much, great to see you. At the Public Theatre until september 4th. You do not want to miss this. Henry ibsens 1879 play a dolls house has long been considered a literary classic. The play ends with a once deutful housewife walking out on her husband and three young children. That conclusion has inspired much debate and speculation over the past century and a half about what happened to her. A new followup from playwright lucas hnath flashes forward 15 years as nora helmer returns to her old home to face her family for the first time. Here is a look. Also, also, heres another thing that bothered me. You dont get angry. Of course i do. Maybe once. Right now i feel angry. Right now are you angry. Damn right i am. I dont believe that you are in angry, that are you in i it, that you are inside the feeling of feeling angry, are you outside of it looking out of it, oh, there is you dont act. Con city fated. Rose a dolls house part two is currently running at the john golden theater. Joining me is the playwright lucas hnath, director sam gold and two of its stars Laurie Metcalf and chris cooper who lay plays torvald. Please to have all of them at this table. Welcome, welcome. Let me begin lucas with you. Did you long think about what in the world was going to happen here and over the aftermath of what happened to the character . Yeah, i mean, i have always loved the play. And i had seen it many productions. And i mean the first thing that came to me was the title. I just thought that was an audacious title for a play, a dolls house, part 2 and it wasnt until i started writing it that i had to really get serious and past the joke of the title and really consider what does it mean to revisit the story. Rose what do you think ibsen intended . I think. Rose people to think about it and speculate about it for all the years after. I think so. Maybe in some ways what i did goes against his intention. I think he wanted that door to slam and us to sort of consider the meaning of nora leaving. And plu you know, over a hundred years later, i think its time to sort of revisit that story and think about well, what does it mean that she left and what did it mean for her to return and what would bring her back. Is there much debate over how she turned out rather than how she might have turned out . Much debate . Well, i love the fact that lucas when he had the idea of what noras outcome would be, i this you pulled some of your friends. Would it be positive or would it be negative. She had just limited options and with no skills and no education, the stigma of being a divorced woman in 1879. So people thought that her options would be negative. So lucas wanted to go in the opposite direction. And when i mean in a positive way, i mean successful way. Shes a success. Do people believe ibsen intended as a feminist argument. I mean i think the thing that ibsen kept coming back to in all of his plays is how are we not free and how could we be more free and is that really truly even possible. And he was a writer who seemed to yearn for people to be more free, to but less con stricted by social norms, social judgement. And so i think a dolls house is part of his consideration of it. And one of the things hes thinking about in this play is the roles that men and women fall into play, playing or are forced to play and so noras action at the end is ta break out of a certain expectation. Yeah. But she comes back for legal reasons. Uhhuh. She has to come back. She has to, yes. He has a very clever method that brings her back. And so whats fun for the audience is to find out whats made her come back, after 15 years of silence, no communication at all. And also what shes been doing in those 15 years. And how does torvald see her. How does torvald see her, as a completely changed person. He doesnt recognize her. Is he surprised . Oh, i think hes dumbfounded. Rose he thought she would go off and drift into nothingness. Well yeah, i mean i think he was convinced that she was she is still living. Rose right. But her outcome, what has happened to her, im sure he has no idea. Rose why does she leave . She has gotten into a spot where she is not sure what she wants. And she has this strong suspicion that the way that she is walking through life is without any understanding of what she is as a person. And so she thinks she needs to go find out who she is. Rose search for identity. Yeah. And i dont think, she certainly doesnt think she can find that person if she stays in this house. Because shell just keep falling too patterns of behavior. So she needs literally a change of scenery. Rose that is an ageless question, who am i . Yeah, yeah. And it is you know, the way the play articulates is it talks about that there is a voice inside of your head. And that voice is you. But you have all these other voices colliding in on it. Voices of your parents, of your husband, of the people in your community telling you what you should be doing. So she has to stop hearing those voices of other people and hear really if i am left to my stef, what do i want for myself. Rose uhhuh, sam is part of this play also not only how they react to her but how she reacts to them . Yeah, you have an amazing, its an amazing surprise, right, the door slammed in 1879 and since then we have all been wondering what happens, what happens to nora helmer t is a fun exercise. And so for this play, you have all this buildup. And excitement about what, what is going to happen when she comes back. What are people, are people going to flip out. Are they going to welcome her back with open arms. What is she here for. And then over the course of the play, you get a sort of series of you know, little meetings between her and the important people in her life where you get, you get the surprise of finding out how they treat her and how she treats them. Some have said about you that you have in a sense preferred a minimalist design of the Theatre Productions that are you involved in. I like to focus on the actors. I like the words and the performers to do all the work. And with this, i really thought about it i think when i read lucas play i thought a little bit of like a boxing match or something. Its got a lot of rhetoric. A lot of argument in it. And it just felt like making a production where it could be great actors kind of sparring. That was the basic idea. Rose where would you rank ibsen, where do you rank this play . It is one of the most important plays in dramatic literature. One because it was extremely shocking when it was written to give a woman, the things you were talking to lucas about, about her inner voice, to give a woman that decision to leave her family to leave her children and to leave at the end of that play and that door slamming was an incredibly important moment in culture history n theater history, then it is i great role that actors have played forever and you get to watch a great actor play, you know, its one of the great roles for this play, its a chance to get to see someone play nora but also get to see someone in a pleatly new play. Its both it boor rows from the old play but also it really is, its own play that gets to use some of the context of in sen but its really lucas and lucas voice a lot more than it has anything to do with ibsen. Rose i guess the fascination too is what man or woman here who had the strength to do this. What manner woman. Rose what manner of woman, in other words, what manner of human being. Yes, i know. Rose to walk out at a time in which nobody ever left the nest or the family. I know, its a wonderful character. Its fascinating and even though i havent done the original dolls house and i still havent, really, i mean im playing nora helmer but it is a totally, she has reinvented herself in the 15 years she has been away. So i felt like i had a free pass to reinvent the character myself. Because its the nora that we see that all, everything that was bottled up in her in the original has come out, exploded. And she has a confidence and a sense of humor. And an aggressiveness about her. And shes on a mission and she is focused. Its just thrilling to be able to play a character whos still very flawed, very flawed in lucas production. But you root for her because she is just so passionate about her feelings. Rose how is she flawed. Oh, shes selfish and she can be pet you lent and she can be kind of petty and she can be impatient. But i find like within a character that still has the passion, i find those negative attributes sort of endearing. Rose this. This is also what has changed torvald. I mean i think having had nora leave the house, this, we use the word torvald is constipated, well, yes, he has he has through these 15 years and this shock that he has taken, hes left to raise three kids with the help of annemarie, the housekeeper, house maid. His life i think is so narrow its the bank and its home. Bank and home. Hes cut he has no social life. He is horrified or very concerned about what society thinks of him. And this, her leaving i think has just turned his world inside out. Rose would she have wanted to come back anyway . Would she be so curious about what happened to them and secondly, i want them to see what has happened to me. Yeah, no, i think thats absolutely true. Its never stated explicitly in the text but you can read between the lines that there is a curiosity. And there in fact is a desire to see her daughter, but a resistance to it because she is worried it could open up some wound and it is better to let wounds heal. But we also talk about the moment when she walks into the door there is a little bit of a vibe of, you know, the person who has just been off to college and learned all these new things and wants to go home and show mom what they learned. And thats sort of the fun of it too. Does the audience choose sides between torvald and nora. The hope is that they choose sides and then they hear another side and slip a flip a lot over the course of the evening. Which is why i used that sports med a for 6789 hopefully you as an audience member feel every side of the argument over the course of the show. I think its one of the things lucas did really w8 and what makes the show really fun. Rose what is the engagement with her daughter. Well,. Rose mommy i disn mean t i did what i had to do for myself. Yes. I mean its so funny that were dealing with a marriage and vrs and then along comes the emmy scene and the daughter, the little three year old who doesnt even remember her mother, the mother daughter are now having a scene together. And they have very different takes on marriage. Which is surprising. And but also it has a lot to do with abandonment. And emmy and emmy comes across as someone who has dealt with it well. But you see how shes been feaked by it. Nora is concerned about emmys desire to live a more conventional life. Uhhuh. Shes concerned about that. She is. She just wants her daughter to have options. She sees in her daughter the same things that she fantasized about what a marriage would be at her daughters age. Rose but that is what fem nism is really about, options. Yes, to have options, yes. The best thing that she can do to give to her daughter as she explains it. She is going out as she is having a second epiphany and heading out the door to do more work towards that ends. Rose what is interesting is that all of these questions are contemporary questions about who we are. What our obligation is, how do we find happiness. What is our responsibility, all that. Yeah, so this production though it takes place in the 1890s and theyre wearing victorian clothes, the writing style is extremely contemporary, the way lucas sort of makes the world it is extremely contemporary. So you feel like you can keep asking yourself over the course of the production what about our world is tractly like victorian norway and what is very different. You keep getting the balance around between the two. Rose how do you add that contemporary sense, necessity to the play, in terms of the staging of it. It was always clear to me to have very contemporary american performances. But the voice of it, when i read it in the writing was not to feel at all period, not to feel at all norwegian, not to feel like some stojy ibsen production but to feel like i was dg a brand new play in a very contemporary american vernacular and let the context, the victorian context sort of happen in the in the subject. And then you know, some beautiful victorian clothes help. Rose. You have incorporated very contemporary sound,nd very contemporary touches like something as simple as a clean exbox. Rose exactly. That point is to make it contemporary. Yeah, i wanted people to see that, yeah, to see the contemporary world and think backwards instead of the other way around. Rose did you want to sort of say, before you, as you started writing this forgive me mr. Ibsen but. I didnt feel apologetic with him. Rose you felt what though, or did you want to say look, at long last you could have somebody answering the questions you raised. It felt like i was having a conversation with him, you know, hes a play writing mentor of mine. And let me do a little bit of an homage to you and riff and do something new as well. I mean i started writing the play, i found a really bad trarcheslation of a dolls house online and cut and pasted it into a new document and just went through line by line and wrote the play in my own words. And stream lined it as much as possible. And that was sort of the way that i was communing with ibsen. Once hi gone through that and gotten to the end, i was ready to just keep going. Rose can you think of any other play ever written that you would like to do part two . I know, the problem is the dramatic canon is most plays people all die at the end. So it is kind of like that eliminates a sequel. But no, i cant. I have ive stood on subway platforms wondering this question many times. And i think this is my only sequel. Rose these be. These points of view of each individual on stage is so valid, is so valid that a person audience member who is of a certain belief, feel has to listen to the argument. And he will hear his side and he will hear a whole other side and he may hear a second, a third and fourth side. And i think it is pg, amazing that the house is quiet. And they, and im surprised that there isnt more outspokenness from the house, you know what i mean . Well, theyre outspoken and there are these big thunderous sections of laughter. And then there are the big gases and stuff, and then its suddenly on a time gets really, really quiet. Theyre outspoken also when a character makes, drives home a point. Yes. Because they, like in a sporting event they applaud when certain points are landed. And every character gets a few. It just seems to me to see this kind of play and to see ibsen in all of its engagement and ideas and experiences is what theater is about, so congratulations on what you have done here. Thanks. Rose dear evan hansen is the hit musical running at the music box theater here in new york. It follows a highschool student with severe anxiety who g gets caught up in a social mediafueled movement after a fellow classmate commits suicide. The New York Times writes star ben platt is giving a performance not likely to be bettered on broadway this season. Dear evan hansen is nominated for nine tony awards including best musical. And here is a look. Youve fallen in a forest and there is nobody around. Do you ever really crash or even make a sound. When youve fall nen a forest and there is nosh around. Do you ever really crash or just make a sound. Did i even make a sound. I did even make a sound. Its like i never made a sound. Did you ever make a sound. On the outside always looking in. Never be more better. Im tap, tap, tapping on the glass. Waiting for the window. Trying to see but nobody can hear. So i wait around for an answer to appear. Im walk, walk, walking. Waiting through a window. Can be anybody see. Is anybody waiting. Waiving back at me. Is anybody waving. Waving. Whoa. applause . Rose joining me is star ben platt who is nominated for best actor in a musical and writer Steven Levinson nominated for best book of a musical. Im pleased to have them both at this table for the first time, welcome. Great to have you here. Thanks for having us. Rose tell me about your character. Evan hansen is a really, really lonely kid, teenager in high school. He is incredibly isolated and has a lot of trouble connecting to other people and that is sort of heightened by the hyperconductive social media and the fact with young people especially everything that they are doing online is being instantaneously judged and looked at so he feels sort of really under deep scrut knee which pulls him deeper and deeper into himself and makes him retreat even more and he really cant find a place to belong and be heard and feel connected to anyone or anything and through this sort of rather terrible lie that he tells about a fake friendship with a kid in his class who committed suicide, evan grows very close to the grieving family of this kid and helps them to heal in a way. And finds a new voice and new confidence and a place to be sort of important and to belong. And finds a new confidence and starts to come out of his shell although it is all pred kateed on this fab ri kaition. Rose hes also a critique of social media. When we started working on this, bench, justin and my, my other fellow writers, composers of the music, we initially talked about it as more of a frontal critique on social media, more of a parody or a satire. And as the show has evolved, i think what we really became interested in was exploring yes, how social media does promote this kind of false idea of who we are and were all kind of performing on there. Rose and do we belong. Yes, exactly. But at the same time, there is Something Real that happens on there. There is a sense of belonging that people find, a sense of connection. And so it really is this double edged sword. Rose yeah. And when you thought about this, when you guys wrote this, was it based on newspaper headline you had seen or story you had seen . Are these things actually happen. It was based originally on bench pasek one of the composers in high school had a classmate who died of an accidental drug overdose. He was someone who was a real loner, kind of an outsider, no friends. And in the wake of his death bench watched as all of his fellow students kind of began clammerring to say oh, i was friends with him or our lockers were close to each other. Everybody wanted a part of that tragedy. And he sort of stored that away as a memory he found troubling. And also very interesting. And also his own response to it, that he too kind of wanted to join in. And then when benj went to college he met justin paul and they began working together. And they discussed is strange story and they both saw echoes of that story in our generation and its response to 9 11. Like we all knew people that had written College Essays about their place in 9 11. And then with social media that kind of insertion of ourselves into tragedy seems to only escalate and get crazier and crazier until any kind of catastrophe in the world became a way for people to talk about themselves. And so then when the three of us began working together that was really where we began. What was the average age of the three of you . The average age, we were all, i believe, 27, maybe 28. No wait, thats not true. We had been working on this for soing lo. We were like 26, we were really young. You still are. Thank you. Rose now is there a challenge for you, youve got to make sure that we explore him and all that he has done and the lies that he is telling yet at the same time make him a character that people dont reject. Certainly. I think that was always from the beginning of the develop am, i came on board three years ago was always sort of the focus on my part and just making sure that the audience really understood at every turn why he was making the decisions he was making and were you seeing sort of that it cass coming from a place of Good Intention and wanting to heal and help people. And i think the most effective, one of the most effectsive things about the show is the first 12, 15 minutes when you get to meet evan and see him give his first monologue and first song you really get an idea of who this kid is and how deep a hole he is in and how in need of a saffier he is. You really understand why he falls into this lie because it so perfectly presents it self. Rose is it a savior for him . I think on some level it ends up being a sort of a saffier, it forces him to connect in a way he never has. But there is a dark side too and it forces him to face demons he has as far as selfhatred and not liking who he sees in the mirror. But at the end of the day it really does, it starts conversations for him especially with his mother which is i think what he with found the show really has the ability to do, is to start conversations with people coming to the show, topics people feel sort of afraid to proach, especially intergenerational conversations, it really seems to just bust think that is what it does for evan. Rose congratulations on the nomination. Thank you very much. Rose as well. Thank you so much. Rose when you right would the book, what does that mean . It means essentially that my responsibility is partly to structure things, to kind of come up with the road map. Rose right. And then all the dialogue and what it meant in this case because we had no source material, you know, often you have a book or a movie, was benj, justin and i kind of came up together with the rud iment of the story and some characters. And then i went off and wrote the first act as though it were a play. And left spaces where the three of us had decided songs might go. And then i sent them that draft and they looked at it and said okay, well here where we thought there would be a song, actually i think the song comes earlier so the scene needs to be shorter or longer or so its a lot of, it kind of building the skeleton. Rose how do you explain this resonance that it has . Its been pretty crazy. Rose other than great acting and great book. Yeah, i think a couple things. I think it really accurately and without any sort of filter or lens depicts the cop temporary world and the way people are connecting with each other these days and the way social media plays into that and sort of doesnt make too harsh of a jjment on that, just sort of presents it the way it is and make us face how that is affecting how we connect as human beings. And i think the character of evan is just object who has an incredible universality as far as his isolation, loneliness and his desire to reach out and be reached out to. And i think everybody that comes to the show finds themselve somewhere in him and can go on this journey with him not only because it is so beautifulfully written, to sort of this selfeffacing humor and singing beautiful songs and are you liking him as a character but i think people really see some of their humanity in him. Rose this is what your mother told the New York Times. Oh dear. Always a reliable fours. Rose exactly. She said i con tell plate bens Emotional Wellbeing every day, is he very mature but he is only 23, he should be out meeting friends and meeting people. I worry about how much time he spend as loan that is your mother. And she calls me to make sure im not a lone. You know. Rose how proud can one mother be. I mean, she is the most wonderful human being on the earth but we dont have to talk about that because that will take, if there is certainly a sacrifice involved with this piece, because it is a demanding role and i take it seriously, my responsibility to cur rate this evening every night and create it eight times a week and give that same sort of emotion 58 intensity and make sure the audience is having identical experience as much as possible, that requires a lot of me as far as sacrificing social life and you know, my lifestyle is really affected but of course this is the kind of piece that is so beautifulfully written and so deeply felt that you want to give yourself to it and make those sacrifices because they dont come along all the time, especially in musical theater. You have been working with the same actors for three years. In that First Reading four of the actors were already in it. Rose and does, has it caused to you change the writing at all. Yeah, i mean. Rose or a line. Well, these actors have really helped shape this material, absolutely. I mean especially ben with this character, you know, i think part of reason that the show resonates so much is bens performance is so specific, and it is that rang par a docks of specificity, the more specificity, the more universallallity, ben and i think have been able to have a kind of conversation where he will do something and i will respond to if in the writing and will respond to it in performance. That has been a real deep pressure. One of the many things stefer endoes brilliantly is finding things in ourselves that we are doing in our performances in development that we are not even noticing that we are doing and refine, we th th we iend beautifulfully flushed out in the writing and really taking advantage of the performers he has and what comes naturally and honestly to them and what makes the characters feel so beautifulfully hon es, will use the seeds of that to create a bigger idea. There could have come from Bruce Springsteen but it comes s from. I feel as long as i do this role has to be in the service of that, i dont want a single performance where people leave i dont think anything can be genuinely fulfilling or powerfully as not taking some kind of a toll, im definitely wilfing to take that toll whatever it might be. Is there a toll, is it simply the endurance of doing it and the requirements of singing that much and the demand you as the performer at the center of this. Sure, i mean i think the literal toll is the physical demand and vocal demands and the sort of physical therapy voice lessons whatever you have. There is also an emotional toll to sort of go to such a dark place eight times a week and make it as real as possible. It is not always the easiest thing to do particularly if it is an audience that say little bit less responsive or a day that just a little lower on energy. You can feel that if they are less responsive. Sure, the beautiful thing about this peeses we get so 130eu8ed because people really go on this journey every night and the response is beautiful by the end of the show every time and i think its just by virtue of, anything from the weather to what has been going on in the world that day to what are the age of the people in the crowd, sometimes it takes them long tore get on the ride and not maybe as vocal. What do you do if you sense that. I try not to push. I think that the instinct is always to sort of go harder and just try to win them but the great thing about there is the material is fantastic and specific and beat to beat so if you lay back and let the show do its job, and sort of not try to slam on the acceleration then they come to you. That is a very good way of putting it. This is the cast singing, you will be found. Here it is. When you need a friend to carry you. When youre broken on the grounds. You will be found. Let the sun come streaming in. You reach up and you will rise again. If you only look around. You will be found. You will be found. You will be found. You will be found. Is a you have got. Weve got five people in there, early to mid 20s playing teenagers and then we have adults, most of them in their mid 40s playing the parents. You have never show him in therapy, do you. No. Why not . You know, i think we wanted to get to know evan with his mom, especially. We wanted that to be the way that we get to know this character and the lens through which we see him. And i dont know, therapy seem tends to be boring to writers. Because theyre so reduckive in a way, its sort of like writing an interview, like where you have one character without whose job is really to just say, you knowk and how does that make you feel. So its, whereas with his mom or with peers there say level of unpredict ability that forces evan. And a higher level engagement too. Absolutely. It runs how long . Indefinitely. Indefinitely. Till the end of the world. Indefinitely. Does it give you if i time to do anything else . Not really. I mean we have mondays off. This is not a theme on my part. You know, we have mondays off, dark on mondays an i try to spend that doing restful nice things. But this is a really exciting time and i love being inundated in it and it is obviously a temporary thing and i want to take it as it comes. Because it has become such a sensation here, are you getting advice from other people, who have also conquered the new york musical stage. Sure, we have a lot of actors that come and i will get to see them afterwards and they will offer their pieces of advice. Their congratulations. Everyone, the thing about the show that is also beautiful is people really are very moved at the end and feel sort of really opened up and so when i do get to interact with people whether it is other actor thation come d ready to discuss and wantingge to be open with me because they feel like we have had this shared emotional experience, that is my favorite time to talk to people. But mostly i get is to just really take, make selfcare a priority and make sure that im taking care of me the human being so me the act ker continue to do my job. Here is evan singing with his girlfriend the song only us, here it is. It will be us, it will be us. And only. And what came before. Wont count any more. You and me. Thats all that we needed to be. And the rest of the world falls away. And the rest of the world falls away. Congratulations. Thank you very much. It is trecial. Thanks. Steven, thank you very much. For more about this program and earlier episodes visit us online at pbs. Org and charlie rose. Com. Captioning sponsored by Rose Communications captioned by Media Access Group at wgbh access. Wgbh. Org and by bloomberg, a provider of multimedia news and Information Services worldwide. Youre watching pbs. He follo was produced in high definition. Every single bite needed to be [ laughter ] twinkies in there. Wow. Its like a great big hug. Its about as spicy as i can handle. Put chili powder in my baby foot. Its all over the table and a lot of