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The Gist
Sarah Ruhl on Lessons from the Teachers Who Shaped Her
00:35:48
Playwright Sarah Ruhl has collected wisdom from her mentors, from Pulitzer winners to driving instructors, in her new book Lessons from My Teachers. She joins Mike to talk about the art of learning, the balance between control and letting go, writing...
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- [00:00]
Mike Pesca
From the Cascades to PDX to your kitchen. We recycle like we live here. That's why governments, brands, and recycling companies are all joining together to bring change to make recycling better. As in trusting that your recyclables end up in the right places to be made into new things and having brands help fund the cost of recycling. You can find the Latest updates@recycleon.org Oregon. From Mount Hood to the bin under your desk, together we can do this. Hi, it's Mike. It's Saturday. It's the Saturday show. Sometimes I play one from the week. Sometimes I play another show I was on. But today I wanted to play a straight up conversation that I did. It's just so very different from the sort of conversations that we play on the gist. I will talk about and to people in the arts, but this is really. This is a playwright, Sarah Rule. I've seen a few of her plays. She's really good and she wrote a book about her teachers. And both my parents are teachers and my sister is a teacher and my of my in laws, 50% were teachers. So actually that's historically true of all my in laws in all my life. So let me say I was attracted to a book about lessons from Sarah's teachers and we compared those lessons and then I talked about a little of the craft of playwriting and what she learned. I enjoyed spending time with her. Like I said, it's a little. It's a few degrees off the normal vibe of the gist. But I enjoy the conversation. I hope you will too. On a Saturday. Sara Rule. Up next, if you want to feel.
- [01:44]
Sarah Ruhl
More connected to humanity and a little.
- [01:46]
Mike Pesca
Less alone, listen to Beautiful Anonymous.
- [01:48]
Sarah Ruhl
Each week I take a phone call from one random anonymous human being.
- [01:53]
Unknown
There's over 400 episodes in our back catalog.
- [01:55]
Mike Pesca
You get to feel connected to all these different people all over the world. Recent episodes include one where a lady survived a murder attempt by her own son.
- [02:04]
Sarah Ruhl
But then the week before that, we just talked about Star Trek. It can be anything.
- [02:08]
Mike Pesca
It's unpredictable, it's raw, it's real. Get Beautiful Anonymous wherever you listen to podcasts. For many years, I've liked the works of playwright Sarah Rule. She wrote Eurydice and she wrote the Vibrator Play. It has a longer title, but we all know it is the Vibrator play. And now she's out with a book about teachers. It is called Lessons from My Teachers. And since my parents were both teachers and I like Sarah Rule, and since it's a really Good book. I decided to have her on. This is sometimes how the bookings go. Hello, Sarah. Welcome to the Gist.
- [02:45]
Sarah Ruhl
Hello. So nice to meet you.
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Mike Pesca
So teachers are important, but are they more important than a student's willingness to be open to teaching?
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Sarah Ruhl
That is such a beautiful question. It's funny, I think I've always taken it for granted in myself that I was the kind of student who was open to teaching and sort of search for teachers and revered teachers. And I think in the course of writing the book, when I talked to many people about who was an important figure in their life, mentor, teacher, and I talked to a couple people, including my sister, who said, oh, I don't really have one. No one kind of stuck that way. I started to consider what it was that allows people to be sort of open and vulnerable enough to open themselves up to teaching.
- [03:37]
Mike Pesca
Well, one thing is you were a great student, an eager student in traditional sense, and the bookstore owners liked you. And even the principal, maybe, who yelled at you for the half a food fight, wound up liking you. But your sister is a psychiatrist, is that right?
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Sarah Ruhl
Yeah.
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Mike Pesca
So she must have been a very good student, too.
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Sarah Ruhl
She was a very good student, too.
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Mike Pesca
Didn't the teachers love her as well? She just, I guess, maybe just a different personality type.
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Sarah Ruhl
You know, it's funny, I don't mean to talk about my sister too much, but I think. I think she's uncomfortable with vulnerability. And I wonder if, you know, she was always well liked by teachers, but she felt anxious, sort of going to office hours or. Or extending herself in other ways for sort of another level of mentorship. I don't know.
- [04:26]
Mike Pesca
Yeah, I was well liked by teachers and I liked my teachers, but I didn't cultivate them. And no one. There's really maybe one person out there who I consider to be a mentor, but you have all these wonderful mentors. Like, actually, the book is a who's who of especially famous American female playwrights. Right. They're all in there. But Paula Vogel, she comes off as very. To you. Now, was it in Paula Vogel's case, was it the professional mentorship leached into the personal? Or did you first connect on the personal level?
- [05:02]
Sarah Ruhl
So I think Paula Vogel was possibly the first, quote, unquote, genius I ever met. I remember sitting in on one of her classes and hearing her talk a blue streak and just thinking, oh, my God, this woman is a genius. So I think it was first the intellectual excitement and fervor that drew me to her. And then as I got to know her better, as A teacher and student. I realized this was a teacher who cared not only about the intellectual lives of her student, but also the personal lives. And I had lost my dad to cancer not long before I studied with Paula. And I remember her sitting down with me, and I said, I'm having trouble writing. And she had such a. A direct gaze and such a wisdom and so much care. And she said, you're having trouble because you're looking at grief too directly. Write about something else. Write about something indirect. Write a play where a dog is the protagonist. And it was that.
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Mike Pesca
I think you wrote something like, write about it upside down or.
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Sarah Ruhl
Upside down. Yeah, obliquely. Like, sort of like you wouldn't look at the sun directly. And I think it. It was that moment where. Where the personal and the. And the classroom came together and. And I felt like Paula. It wasn't just about what she taught me about plays. It was how she conducted herself as a human being. Her generosity, her bravery. It was all of that. It was that mentorship, but also that example, you know, the proximity to her example.
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Mike Pesca
And do you think. Which was the play about your dad's death told through the dog?
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Sarah Ruhl
It was called Dog Play, but it. You know, it's. It's. I don't think it's published.
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Mike Pesca
Do you. Do you think, insofar as it did work, was it that it was the profundities about death or the novelty of hearing about it from a dog and how a dog might experience death?
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Sarah Ruhl
I think there was something moving in the play about a dog's point of view, because the dog is sort of waiting for my father to come home, and he's not coming home. And he's not coming home. And I think because we don't normally hear from a dog about mourning or loss, it allowed the reader to see it in a new way.
- [07:27]
Mike Pesca
Another thing I just want to note for the readers that. That Paula Vogel, who. I guess her most famous play is How I Learned to Drive, she literally taught your daughter how to drive, which is, like, I don't know, being taught salesmanship from Arthur Miller.
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Sarah Ruhl
That's so funny. I love that.
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Mike Pesca
Because you really did love driving.
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Sarah Ruhl
Yes. I mean, Paula loves to drive. She's good at driving. And so she gave my daughter some very practical advice on how to drive, and I think was a much better teacher of driving than I was for my daughter.
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Mike Pesca
By the way, I'm teaching teenagers in Brooklyn how to drive. And there's a lesson there about make yourself known at the intersection that I'm definitely going to teach Them. So you taught me. She taught you, you taught me.
- [08:18]
Sarah Ruhl
That's so great. We were in Cape Cod visiting Paula, where she lives with her wife, Ann, and we were pulling up to an intersected section where Anna was. And Paula said, pull up more. Pull up more. Make yourself visible. And I thought about that phrase a lot. Make yourself visible. And what a beautiful mantra that is for driving, but also for life.
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Mike Pesca
Yeah. Most of your teachers are nurturing. This is a characteristic of a teacher. One was. In a moment, I'm not going to say dismissive. She answered honestly. And this was your. And this was. You were. You wanted to write a joke. I love this. I love this idea. So the play is Clean house. And the idea is, the challenge was you wanted to start off with a joke in Portuguese and somehow the joke would be so good that the audience would get it. This was your challenge, right? Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. And when you told this to your teacher, she said, quote, but that's stupid. How will the joke be funny if no one can understand the joke? Did that help? Like, obviously you think. Thought about that.
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Sarah Ruhl
Well, that was Maria Irene Fornes, who's a total genius. And I think what helped me about it was her plain spokenness about it, her utter lack of, you know, couching it. I thought it was totally delightful. It didn't stop me in my tracks. I just thought, that's so Irene.
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Mike Pesca
So did. Did it work? Did the aud. Does the audience usually laugh when the Brazilian housekeeper tells a joke they can't understand?
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Sarah Ruhl
Yes, because I chose a joke that had a lot of physical humor in it. And I guess it also depends on the actor who's telling it. But if the actor is funny and if they do the physical humor, it does work.
- [10:14]
Mike Pesca
And I would also think that maybe there'd be a possibility where you could do that if it was a joke, the equivalent of. Which was known in English. Like, there. There's a chance, right? There's a chance you could tell the Portuguese version of, I don't know, the three guys who go into the bar. Well, it couldn't be a pun, I suppose, but through act outs there could be some recognition.
- [10:38]
Sarah Ruhl
Yeah, I just. I'm very interested always in plays by what is in the language and what's beyond language. You know, what is transmitted by the language, but what is transmitted through the body and the visual life of the play. So that even if you might go another country and not know the language, you could sit down and watch, I don't know, Romeo and Juliet, and you would know which which bits were moving and which bits were meant to be funny?
- [11:06]
Mike Pesca
I think I saw an interview with you where you were talking about that. Exactly. Happening with a German production of Eurydice. Is that right? Yes, but it worked. Of course. You wrote Eurydice, so. Or you wrote this version so you knew it was happening.
- [11:23]
Sarah Ruhl
Yeah. That it was very German. It was like, you know, 10 hours long. It was like three hours long. Everyone had clown makeup. There was a pit that was moving that you could fall into. Yeah, it was. It was hilariously German.
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Mike Pesca
Are you. When you. When. When a theater produces one of your plays, how much say do you have over if they can do it and what they could do to it?
- [11:50]
Sarah Ruhl
In a premiere, you have a lot of say, and you're in the room a lot, and you know the designers, you have approval over the actors and. And that could be true, maybe in a second production, but after that, playwrights tend to let it go, or at least I tend to let it go, and they can do whatever they please. Beyond changing the language.
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Mike Pesca
Have you ever had to come in and say, no, that's not gonna happen? Just a flat out rejection as opposed to an iterative tweaking.
- [12:24]
Sarah Ruhl
I can't remember an instance of. Of when that had happened. I mean, if the German production had come to me and said, you know what? We'd like to add a prologue by Heiner Mueller. Which they did, and we want four stones instead of three and we want them to fly, I probably would have said no, but since they didn't ask.
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Mike Pesca
Better to ask for forgiveness, not permission. Except they didn't ask for forgiveness. But it became an anecdote.
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Sarah Ruhl
Yeah, exactly.
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Mike Pesca
And you went out there to where was it? Berlin?
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Sarah Ruhl
It wasn't even Berlin. It was a small theater in, like, Heilbronn or something, like. Because Germans. Because the government funds the theater there, they have, like, really nice theaters all over the place, even the middle of nowhere, and they'll have a nice, you know, place to eat and drink beer and go to the theater.
- [13:12]
Mike Pesca
Yeah, I guess the consideration for a playwright is even though you want to be. You want to cultivate the arts, and the arts are. Well, you have that famous quote in there about great par. Great poets borrow or good poets borrow and great poets steal, and then poets transform. So all that is true. You want to be open to. To experimentation. On the other hand, if this little town outside of Heilberg knows one thing about Sarah Rule, and it's this play, and it's this presentation of a play with long monologues, and like, some MTV videos, I don't know. That might be a massive misrepresentation of your work or intent.
- [13:52]
Sarah Ruhl
Yes. I think being a playwright is an interesting relationship between control and letting go, because obviously, you control what people say. And so that's kind of exciting, especially if you grew up as sort of shy and reserved. But you also want to leave enough empty space and enough possibility that all of these collaborators, actors, designers, directors want to play inside the playground you've created. And if you're super controlling, it can be not as fun to play in that playground. So, you know, Beckett was super controlling. Every detail had to be a certain way. You had to follow the stage directions to the, you know, Nth degree. And I tend to be a little looser with that stuff.
- [14:37]
Mike Pesca
Yeah. So then how, if you. If you're loose, but you have a strong, strong instinct that that's not the way to do it. And, in fact, this came up with your first play where the director was Joyce Piven, who was one of your early mentors, and she and her husband taught the theater company in class that, like, everyone from the Cusacks to their son to everyone else went through, and you were one of them. So they do they stage your first play ever, and she has some directorial choice that you disagreed with, but was it that you were too young or you weren't. You didn't know how to articulate, or you didn't know how to not. You didn't know how to step in the way of that directorial choice, and then you got a bad review from it. So what was going on? What's your analysis in retrospect?
- [15:24]
Sarah Ruhl
Well, it was a really interesting story. It was a play called Orlando that's an adaptation of the Virginia Woolf novel. And in the novel, Orlando is born in the 1500s as a man, and then he lives. He sleeps through some centuries, lives, you know, 400 years. And in the 19th century, wakes up one day and is a woman. So it's a meditation on gender and one person who's lived in two different bodies. So I always imagined it played by one actor in one body. And Joyce always imagined it as having one actor in her company who's a man play the first half and a woman in the second half. And for me, that was sort of a conservative choice because it meant one actor didn't have to, I don't know, contend with, you know, different kinds of sexualities and different kinds of experiences in one body.
- [16:16]
Mike Pesca
Right. It's also kind of communicating to the audience a different intent, I think than what you, as the playwright or Virginia Woolf had in mind. To really emphasize this is the same person, it's letting them off the hook a little bit.
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Sarah Ruhl
It did. It did. It let them off the hook a little bit. And I think it was partly that Joyce had an ensemble theater company, and so she was interested in giving good parts out to many people. So partly, I think she wanted to give both these actors a chance. I think the culture was probably more conservative at that time around sexuality and gender, because it would have been God, you know, 25 years ago. And I think, funnily enough, she and I just didn't talk about it. We didn't. We. We both assumed in our minds that the other would have made the same choice. It wasn't sort of. Until we got to rehearsal, we realized we had different notions of it. And at that point, because I was all of 23, I mean, I was. I was a baby. And Joyce was my mentor and this formidable person, I really did not have the wherewithal to negotiate a change to that plan. But what was interesting was Joyce and I continued our friendship and mentorship over the course of my entire life and her life. And she went on to direct the same play in LA a couple years later. And my friend Polly Noonan, who's a woman, played the whole thing. So there was a learning curve and an evolution in our relationship, too, from teacher, student to collaborators.
- [17:46]
Mike Pesca
But when you got. It's in the book because of. As an aside, actually, but I was interested of the bad review you got. The first review you got was a bad review.
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Sarah Ruhl
Yeah.
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Mike Pesca
So, yeah. Does the fact that it was Joyce's choice and not yours, that it was the opposite of your choice, did that take the sting out a little.
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Sarah Ruhl
You know what's funny? You'd think it would, but it sort of didn't. I felt humiliated. And I think there was something in the headline that was sort of humiliating, or I. I read it that way, and I remember I. I took a smucker's jar into the basement. I was so upset, and I. I broke the smucker. I, like, threw it on the ground, like in some. You know, really. It's so pathetic as a suggestor, because then I swept it out very carefully in case the dog would.
- [18:35]
Mike Pesca
You were the only one who saw it.
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Sarah Ruhl
Yeah, I know. And I was like, I'm never reading them. And Joyce, very generous, called me, and she had this amazing deep voice, and she said, you took the hit for me, Sarah. You know, she was very generous, and I didn't falter at all. I just felt humiliated. And I vowed never to read reviews again.
- [18:58]
Mike Pesca
What flavor.
- [19:01]
Sarah Ruhl
Raspberry was it?
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Mike Pesca
And it was full. It wasn't an empty jar. The red went everywhere.
- [19:07]
Sarah Ruhl
It would have been half full.
- [19:08]
Mike Pesca
Yeah, these are important details. And we'll be back in a minute with more of Sarah Rule, author of Lessons from My Teachers.
- [19:25]
Unknown
From unsolved mysteries to unexplained phenomena, from comedy gold to relationship fails, Amazon Music's got the most ad free top podcasts included with prime because the only thing that should interrupt your listening is, well, nothing. Download the Amazon Music app today.
- [19:50]
Mike Pesca
We're back with Sarah Rule, Playwright, essayist, poet. She wrote the Vibrator Play. She's two time Pulitzer Prize finalist. She's going to get there. Tony Award nominee, MacArthur Genius, Grand Fellowship puts her in a pretty good position to share with us some more lessons from her teachers. So I think three, maybe four times in the book you refer to Melancholy Play, and then you say immediately afterwards, in which a character gets so sad that she turns into an almond. And it became almost a, oh, what do you call a Homeric epithet? You know, where it's always like fleet footed Achilles. Why did you say that every single time? Did you not trust us to remember what Melancholy Play was about?
- [20:31]
Sarah Ruhl
I think maybe I thought, well, if someone's skipping around in the essays and not reading in a linear way, they might need to know what the plot is. And I just felt the need to. To elucidate that for them. Or may, or maybe I didn't do a good job editing. That's hilarious.
- [20:48]
Mike Pesca
No, but it's a very good log line. Right. Like, if you had just said Melancholy Play, it seems a little like a downer, but the repeating of this in which a woman becomes so sad she turns into an almond, it makes me.
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Sarah Ruhl
Want to say it should be part subtitle.
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Mike Pesca
Yes. Melancholy Play. In which. Right. If the vibrator. Tell me about naming the vibrator play.
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Sarah Ruhl
Yes.
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Mike Pesca
What's the, what's the full name?
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Sarah Ruhl
In the Next room or the Vibrator play. Now you, you are correct. I call it the Vibrator Play. When I speak of it. The working title was the Vibrator Play. And I think some people have thought that I worried that, you know, people would be too embarrassed to ask for tickets if they called I want tickets for the Vibrator play so that I made it in the next room. But it was actually that once I finished the, like, I felt like the themes in it were bigger than just Vibrators that it was ultimately about intimacy and compartmentalization and what we do in other rooms of our sort of psyches. So I felt like I wanted to expand it thematically. And then I love, like, in 19th century novels and plays, that there's always some little subtitle.
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Mike Pesca
Yes. Or some very long subtitle.
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Sarah Ruhl
Yes.
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Mike Pesca
Or a contemplation upon the nature of humanity with regard to the wildebeest. Yes. So you teach at Yale, correct?
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Sarah Ruhl
Yes.
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Mike Pesca
Tell me about. Because it's in the book. Is there any way around the graduate school drama industrial complex?
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Sarah Ruhl
Well, it's interesting, you know, less and less so, I think, because it's just so common. And so more and more people go to graduate school in drama, and so it's sort of how you meet people and it. It becomes a thing. Having said that, I think there's no reason you couldn't do it on your own. I just feel like we've lost a little bit in the theater this sort of more guild mentality of mentorship within a company. We have fewer ensembles. It used to be like, be young, you join a company, an older actor might mentor you, and you just learn through doing. But we have fewer ensembles. The economics have shifted, and in a way, I think our MFA acting programs are almost like the Medicis of, you know, Florence. It's. It's. The universities are like a patronage system where you get your training and you have time to grow and become.
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Mike Pesca
Well. As a journalist, the similar thing happened in my field, and I always bemoaned it, though I understand people of a generation or half. Generation younger. Exactly what you said. The idea of a guild, or not having to do it as a form of advancement, that had faded away. But still to this day, I say, if you can avoid going to journalism school, you really should. Do you say the same thing about MFA programs and drama?
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Sarah Ruhl
What I say is if you can avoid going to a pain program.
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Mike Pesca
Yeah.
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Sarah Ruhl
Avoid it. Like Yale happens to be free for the students. And so I feel like if you can write a body of work in a supported way and come out with three plays, by all means.
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Mike Pesca
Yeah.
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Sarah Ruhl
But if you're.
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Mike Pesca
And is that because David Geffen gave a billion dollars? Is that what happened?
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Sarah Ruhl
That's a big reason. And then the other. So before David Geffen, there was Paula Vogel, who was at the program and was determined that playwrights should not have huge loans. So she. She fundraised for the playwrights, and then Geffen came in and made it so that the whole school was tuition free.
- [24:24]
Mike Pesca
I did not realize well, you tell me. I thought the economics of being a dramatist worked out for, like, four people in America, and then everyone else had to hustle and relied on their occasional MacArthur Genius grants and congratulations on that. But did. I mean, I did Paula Vogel made that much money from the play, from her plays.
- [24:44]
Sarah Ruhl
She always taught also. You know what I mean? I think. I think playwrights, either you teach or you write screenplays. I mean, it's. It's very, very rare that you don't do one or the other to support the very expensive hobby of being a dramatist.
- [24:59]
Mike Pesca
And you were at an MFA program. And then as you write about in the book, some teacher wanted you to put your head down on a desk and think about your inner light. And that. That didn't take. And then. So what happened? You did a year without actual graduate school, and then you went back?
- [25:18]
Sarah Ruhl
Yeah, I lived in New York for a year. It was actually great for me because I was such a little school person, you know, such a little school mom. So to drop out of grad school and just be in the school of New York and have 5 million jobs and see as many plays as I could was fantastic for me and was a great education. And then I went to Brown and got my mfa.
- [25:43]
Mike Pesca
Many of your plays were either specifically about or inspired by your parents and your parents getting old and aging. And you write also about. Your dad would take you to a pancake house and teach you a vocabulary word. Every time you'd go. And you taught me a vocabulary word which I should have figured was out there. It's the female version of fratricide. It's. How would you pronounce it?
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Sarah Ruhl
Sororicide.
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Mike Pesca
Sororicide. Very good. But it came up in the context of the gerbils. What's that?
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Sarah Ruhl
I love this story. Oh, my God. So my. My kids had three gerbils? No. Was it three or four? I mean, basically, first they'd gotten two. They came home with two gerbils. I didn't want any gerbils. I thought they were like vermin. My husband got them two gerbils, but then they felt bad because I guess they were separated from their sisters. There were four gerbils originally. So they. They went back and got the other gerbils because they felt bad. No, it must have been three. That one was left behind. That makes more sense. Three kids, three gerbils. That's what it was. So one day I was on a work call, and I keep getting these calls from my kid coming through, and I think there's an emergency. So I click over and they said, mom, you've got to come home. I. I was cleaning the cage and I went in to pick out, you know, Professor Nibbles, and all I got was a tail. I was like, oh, my God. So disgusting. And it turned out like the sisters had eaten each other. I was like, so much for sisterhood is powerful. These gerbils, like, ate each other. And to this day, my kids are like, no, like, they didn't kill each other. They just died. And then they ate each other to be a part of each other.
- [27:30]
Mike Pesca
Oh, okay. Maybe had to tell them. I mean, you know, stories are what we tell ourselves, too.
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Sarah Ruhl
Yes.
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Mike Pesca
Get through at one point in the book. Well, I'll read the whole passage. The question of whether playwriting is teachable begets another question. Is devotion teachable? Or begets other questions, like, is devotion teachable? Is listening teachable? Is a love of art and a willingness to give your life over to art teachable? I believe these things are teachable mostly by example and in great silences. That is true. But how do you know if you're being a good teacher if you're mostly being silent? There is. Because you're a teacher also. No, here's my point. It seems that some of the most profound lessons are gleaned or picked up and not inserted into the person's head. But isn't there a bit of flop sweat on the teacher's part to just trust that the students will get it or to get the lesson that's unsaid?
- [28:39]
Sarah Ruhl
Yes. I mean, I think there's the teaching you're conscious of, and there's the teaching you're unconscious of. So, you know, you're busy with your flop sweat doing the conscious teaching. And then. And then your student, 10 years later says, you know what you once told me and you don't remember it at all. I remember a student saying, you know what? You told me I was having a really hard time with this play. And I was. And she said. And you said. You quoted a Taylor Swift song and just said, like, shake it off. And I was like, I did? That doesn't sound like me. Like, okay, I. I guess, you know, it's these ways in which you conduct yourself spontaneously that are often what imprint themselves on the student's mind. You can. You can be so thoughtful about lessons you're trying to impart, and then they notice that you bought them food when they were hungry, or you. I don't know, tiny little gestures that you don't even remember doing and that a student remembers forever.
- [29:41]
Mike Pesca
There's a lot in the book about where to get and how to give inspiration exercises. Many, many different examples. And it's not as if you're being didactic. Here's Sarah's guide for a writing spark. One is there was. Who was it who said, pull down a cookbook, look at the phrase cookbook, and start that as a writing exercise. That's a great idea. Yeah, yeah. And I also note, and we both agree, there's no such thing as write it. Writer's block. It's like the same thing as exercise block. Or you could you call anything a block if you don't want to do it?
- [30:16]
Sarah Ruhl
Right? Yeah, yeah.
- [30:17]
Mike Pesca
So those are great. Another idea to us to spark an idea is to write something as a gift. And some great works of literature and plays are just ever intended to be a gift. Did any of your plays come from a prompt like that? A specific prompt where someone was trying to give you a prompt?
- [30:39]
Sarah Ruhl
So Paula Vogel has this amazing thing she does where she. She asks you to write a play in 48 hours. She calls it the 48 Hour Play Bake Off. And she'll give you ingredients to put into the play. And my play Late a Cowboy Song came from one of those prompt. And I believe one thing that was in the prompt was somebody being late. I believe so, but I'd have to look back at that and then. And then the gift. Plays are something that I came up with after I'd been writing plays for 15 years or so. And I think, you know, I'd had some tough knocks, and I was trying to think about why I wrote plays, what, what, what the impetus was. And I had read Lewis Hyde's the Gift, which is such an incredible book, and talks about how to be an artist in this particular economy, when in a way, what you're doing is gift giving, but then the economy values it in a different kind of way. And so I very intentionally wrote sort of a series of plays as gifts. And one of them was for my mother, and it was called For Peter pan on her 70th birthday. And I gave it to my mom for his 70th birthday. Oh, my God. My mom literally is calling me right now, and my.
- [31:56]
Mike Pesca
Are the gerbils dead?
- [31:57]
Sarah Ruhl
That's really weird. Hi, Mom. Anyway, my mom's an actress in Chicago. I'll watch. She'll try to call me again when I don't pick up. And she played Peter Pan when she was little in Iowa, and so I wrote a play for her to perform.
- [32:14]
Mike Pesca
And met Mary Martin, which was.
- [32:15]
Sarah Ruhl
Yes, you met Mary Martin.
- [32:17]
Mike Pesca
That's the way to do it. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
- [32:19]
Sarah Ruhl
She was in Davenport, Iowa, and Mary Martin was coming through. And so they set up a little like press junket where Mary Martin got to meet the local Peter Pan.
- [32:29]
Mike Pesca
So, I mean, she was a big deal. Peter Pan for Iowa. It wasn't just the community theater. All of Davenport watched her.
- [32:35]
Sarah Ruhl
Your mom is Peter Pan? Yes, that's right. Yeah. She did it like three times. So as a child, my mom flying in green tights was this iconography. I mean, she was in a picture flying in green tights, like everywhere. So my young idea of theater and the kind of excitement of it and glamor of it was associated with that.
- [32:54]
Mike Pesca
Jump off point of the book. Is your mom essentially saying, I have no legacy? Did that insult you? Hello? I'm right here, Mom.
- [33:04]
Sarah Ruhl
Not at all. It made me sad. It was, it was when my mom, you know, was around 70 and I called her and she was sad one day and said, sort of, I don't know what I've left behind. And I asked her, what about, what about me? What about my sister? And she said, that's you. I'm. I'm separate. And, and in a way, I really appreciated that, that she modeled for me as a mother. That, you know, you, you have your own ambitions and, and your kids aren't necessarily the fruition of, of that.
- [33:38]
Mike Pesca
Have you gotten reaction or feedback from teachers of yours who have read the book, know about the book, have things to add to the book?
- [33:48]
Sarah Ruhl
Yes, as a practice, I sent every essay to every person I wrote about. And I was really glad that that was my process because three of the teachers died, you know, since I wrote the essay initially and I was able to give it to them while they were still alive. So. Joyce Piven. I lost Tina Howe and David Constant. My third grade teacher, May Boland, immediately started copy editing it and found several typos, including her name. I had called her Mrs. Boland and she said I was always Ms. Never Mrs. Basically. How could you forget?
- [34:29]
Mike Pesca
Amazing. And what about your students? What's their reaction been?
- [34:36]
Sarah Ruhl
Well, one of the most prominent students I write about, Max Ritvo, who was an incredible poet. He was in my undergraduate class at Yale and he died of Ewing sarcoma when he was 24. So obviously I don't have Max's reaction to the essay, although we wrote another book together. I'm trying to think of other students who I've sent the book to. I'm Sorry, there's so much death here.
- [35:06]
Mike Pesca
Lessons are tied up with death. I mean, but you know, I think that there's a value.
- [35:11]
Sarah Ruhl
Yeah.
- [35:12]
Mike Pesca
When someone dies, you think of the format of the eulogy. You think to maybe go and get some pieces of wisdom or pieces of poetry or to even just examine your relationship with the person. And that's one of the enduring literary traditions that, you know, binge watching on Netflix hasn't taken away yet. So that's a good thing about death.
- [35:36]
Sarah Ruhl
You're right. I mean, it provides the ultimate lesson that life is impermanent and that we should love each other and tell each other so. And that time is sometimes shorter than we might think. And I think writing the book reminded me of that because as I said, you know, Tina Howe, who was an incredible teacher, I was able to send her the essay while she, she had some dementia, but, but, but was essentially herself and she was so delighted by it. So I think, you know, if I have one take home message from the book, it's to write a letter to your teacher. Don't, don't wait. Tell. Tell your teachers how much they meant to you.
- [36:21]
Mike Pesca
The name of the book is Lessons from My Teachers from Preschool to the Present. The author is Sarah Rule and it made me so happy, I did not want to turn into an almond. Thank you. Thank you so much, Sarah.
- [36:33]
Sarah Ruhl
Thank you.
- [36:40]
Mike Pesca
That's it for today's show. Cory Wara produces the Gist. I assembled the Gist list alongside Kathleen Sykes. I mean, not really alongside. She's in Utah. I'm here. But we collaborate, as do Astrid Green and the team. She runs our socials and Ashley Khan is our production coordinator who's in charge. It's Michelle Pesca. As I'll tell you, she is loathe to say in Peru. G. Peru. Do Peru. And thanks for listening.
- [37:11]
Unknown
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