← The New Yorker Radio Hour
The New Yorker Radio Hour
Terrific, Tremendous New Health Plans, and Lynn Nottage on her play “Sweat”
00:55:01
Ideas to replace Obamacare that will blow your mind; Lynn Nottage’s new play about racial tension in the Rust Belt; and Jessica Lange’s foray into the art of mime.
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- [00:04]
Jessica Lange
Floor 38.
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Hilton Als
I basically just think it would be.
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Joe Williams
Interesting to look at the emergence of a criminal economy.
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Jessica Lange
And also I'm always amazed that there aren't more profiles of her out there.
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Kate Wariski
This really subversive, strange thing in rap.
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Lynn Nottage
Especially, and see what their lives are.
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Jessica Lange
Like on both sides of the border.
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Kate Wariski
From one World Trade center in Manhattan, this is the New Yorker Radio Hour, a co production of WNYC Studios and the New Yorker.
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David Remnick
Welcome to the New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick. The Republican health bill was dead on arrival, but we haven't heard the last about the effort to replace Obamacare with something much better. Something great, tremendous, the best health care you've ever seen, believe me.
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Narrator/Announcer
The White House is proud to present brand new health care plans that'll save billions of dollars and possibly save several lives. The Platinum Plan. For a monthly premium of $250,000, this plan gives you prime access to all health care options. No referrals or ailments required. The Gold plan. The same as the Platinum plan, but only available to people who own a gold mine. The Silver Plan. For the incredible price of just $49.99 a month, you'll receive a 500 milliliter bottle of an unbelievable liquid miracle cure containing nanoparticle colloidal silver. Just 1 tablespoon daily will boost immune system strength, make skin look decades younger, and improve your performance in the boardroom and the bedroom. You can trust me. I'm on the radio. The Bronze Plan. You can see any doctor in your network for only a $10 copay. Your deductible is 40 million. DOL emergency plan. If you're a woman who needs quick and compassionate help with family planning or contraception, this taxpayer funded plan allows you to see any in network Priest. The Granite Plan. Free pickup of your carcass from the gutter after your death. Granite plus includes all the features of the Granite Plan plus a guarantee that you'll be buried in your own grave. The Single Payer plan. A single payer covers the entire cost of your health care. The single payer is you.
- [02:38]
David Remnick
New health care plans available under Trump was written by Sam Weiner and published in the New Yorker in February. It was performed for the Radio hour by Sherrock O'Dunlap. Now, one point of clarification, that's a work of fiction, at least as of now. A few years ago, the playwright Lyn Nottage, a winner of the Pulitzer Prize, began working on a play set in Reading, Pennsylvania. Reading is an old factory town where the Manufacturing jobs have been drying up for years, and in their place, there's unemployment, poverty, and outlet malls. Nottage, who's black, was interested in how racial tension is linked to economic hardship, and she tells that story through three working class women, along with their sons, the owner of the bar they hang out in, and the busboy. The play is called Sweat, and it premiered in 2015. And over the last year, as the presidential campaign of Donald Trump gathered steam, pitting the frustration of the white working class against minorities and immigrants, Sweat began to look remarkably prescient. It's just opened on Broadway in a terrific production, and the morning after I saw it, I sat down with Lyn Nottage and the director, Kate Wariski. I began by asking him about the initial research on the play when they traveled together to Reading, Pennsylvania. So what happens the first time you show up? You announce yourself, you just drive down there. And here I am, Lynne Nottage and Kate Werowski. And here we are. To take the pulse of Reading. Is it as weird an experience as it is for a journalist?
- [04:20]
Lynn Nottage
It is really weird, and it's probably much more familiar to you than it is for me, because those are not muscles that I have. And Kate and I for ruined. We had experienced sort of going into a place that was completely unfamiliar and sort of there.
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David Remnick
You're writing about. Writing about East Africa, you're writing about Congo, and you went to Uganda for.
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Lynn Nottage
A while we went to Uganda, and we didn't know anyone in Uganda. And we thought we'd just have to be brave and begin to ask questions. And I think that our approach in Reading was really similar. We reached out to the mayor, who was very welcoming. We reached out to the Reading film office. We reached out to some of the places like United Way, and from there we met people, and then it rippled out.
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Jessica Lange
Hmm.
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David Remnick
And you show up. And how do you conduct your research sessions? You just have conversations. Now, if I go there, I'm there with a notebook, and I get people's names spelled correctly in their ages, because that's the nature of journalism. For a play, you're doing something maybe a little bit different.
- [05:18]
Kate Wariski
No, I mean, part of it is experiential. There is someone who we met who is a Vietnam veteran, and his work is to help other veterans who are homeless. And so he will go and give them food, cigarettes, whatever. And so on my first trip, actually to Reading, Lyn invited me to go with him, and we just walked for a long time to find these men. And so the interesting thing is the experience and what you say is that it is a very strange time when you're walking with a stranger and you're trying to get to know them and see what their daily life is like.
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David Remnick
So paint a picture of reading for people who live elsewhere who are listening. What does the place look like?
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Lynn Nottage
I was surprised because of the physical beauty and, you know, and it's a combination of sort of colonial homes and homes that were built in the early and mid 20th century. You know, the architecture is quite striking and you don't immediately see the poverty on the surface. It's a beautiful city.
- [06:20]
David Remnick
So how do characters begin to form? How do you begin to see a play out of the raw stuff of reality? You're starting to talk to people about their losing their jobs and the conditions of their lives. How do you begin to transform that into an imaginative work as opposed to journalism?
- [06:40]
Lynn Nottage
Well, I think for me it's the moment of transition came when I was sitting in the room with these steelworkers and they told me a story that literally broke my heart. And I thought, oh, I'm feeling something so profound and something different. I have to go inside and investigate this feeling. These were, by and large, middle age white men who had worked in the same factory for between 25 to 40 years, who had completely bought into the American dream, had a whole notion of how their lives were going to proceed probably for the next 25 years. They arrive at their factory one day and all of the machines are gone. And they're told basically they don't have jobs. And if they want jobs, they're going to have to make these serious concessions, which involves giving up perhaps, you know, 50%.
- [07:35]
David Remnick
And these were guys making how much money?
- [07:36]
Lynn Nottage
These are guys who were probably making 35 to $40 an hour. These were people who were solidly middle class, you know, who had homes and mortgages and who were taking vacations two weeks every year. Yeah, yeah. And then woke up the next day and they had nothing for a while. I think there was a belief that they would be able to get back into their factories. They were locked out, so they refused to sort of meet the company's demands. And they weren't even given sort of the privilege of striking, which is really the new tactic that's used today. The factory actually remained with a couple of the machines intact, but they brought in what I think a lot of the industry is doing today is they're bringing in temps, people who will work, you know, for significantly less. And they can employ those people for a couple of months and then push them out without giving benefits.
- [08:25]
David Remnick
And what's interesting of the many things that are interesting about the play, Sweatt, is that the dynamics and the friendships are at least in many ways, so easy that it's only when two women who are competing for the same job, one African American, one white, the African American woman gets the job, does that relationship suddenly become uneasy and much worse.
- [08:49]
Jessica Lange
Right.
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David Remnick
That their friendship is incredibly long standing, beautiful. And other friendships and other dynamics in the play, the same thing. Did you find that to be part and parcel of reading or your own experience or what?
- [09:07]
Lynn Nottage
It's interesting because a lot of times when we're in conversation with people in reading, just under the surface was this unspoken racism. And when pressed, you'd say, well, why isn't reading working now? And they sort of pushed the microphone aside. Let me tell you the truth, it's not working because of them. And when you press well, who is them? And them is always who they consider the interlopers, the outsiders, the people who came and sort of changed the status quo.
- [09:39]
David Remnick
And the person who exemplifies this most is at the center of the drama eventually is Oscar busboy, Oscar boy, who is eventually seen as the great focus of resentment because he's crossing a picket line.
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Jessica Lange
Right.
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David Remnick
And you saw that play itself out in Reading.
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Lynn Nottage
Yeah, it definitely plays itself out in Reading is that you have a new generation of immigrants.
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David Remnick
Where are they from?
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Lynn Nottage
Who in Reading, it's predominantly Puerto Rico Rican and Dominican immigrants who are entering into town, who are seeking opportunity the same way that the wave of German Italian immigrants and African American immigrants that came saw their fortunes. And in some instances, because you have companies that are pushing out some of the higher wage employees, you have some of the new immigrants that are willing to take those jobs, and there's a lot of resentment.
- [10:35]
David Remnick
So you come home, essentially, both of you, and you have stacks of material, you have films, you have tapes, you have transcripts of interviews and notes and so on. Then what? How does it go from being that material, that empirical material, to the play that swept me away last night?
- [10:56]
Lynn Nottage
It's interesting because I think that this is where I take a different path from perhaps you, a journalist, is that I push aside all of the research and then I don't look at it again. I need room to sort of be free and to roam.
- [11:11]
David Remnick
Now, as a playwright and as a director, what political plays, what political theater that you've seen as you know, growing up or as you've come along, impressed you and influences you in terms of what's really strong and Effective and moving at the same time for me.
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Kate Wariski
Athal Fugart, even when I was a child, I remember thinking that his work.
- [11:33]
David Remnick
Was South African playwright.
- [11:35]
Kate Wariski
South African playwright. And what impressed me about his writing is it felt both personal and political, so it wasn't easily digestible. Lyn?
- [11:48]
Lynn Nottage
Yeah, for me, I think of when I came of age in the playwright is with Angels in America, Tony Kushner's play. With Tony Kushner's play, which I remember seeing it, and it spoke so in such an extraordinary way to sort of the. At least the internal struggle that I was having, having lived through an age in which a lot of my friends and a lot of people who I admired were dying and trying to just digest that fact when you're only in your early 20s. And then also, it's the work of Ann Deavere Smith, Fires in the Marrow. I remember seeing that and just being so struck by how she engaged with a subject matter at the right moment when we needed to be inside that conversation.
- [12:34]
David Remnick
Yeah. Are there particular perils of political playwriting as opposed to other forms?
- [12:39]
Lynn Nottage
Yeah, I think so. I mean, I think one of the perils is that people will resist what has to be said, which is something that we've definitely encountered, I think. And I actually could go on and on about this. I think that there is a real resistance in our culture to engage with political topics in the theater. And when you do, you're sort of immediately accused of being didactic or having an agenda. And I'm really one of these people who's not afra to say, yeah, it's okay to be.
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David Remnick
What's wrong with having an agenda?
- [13:09]
Lynn Nottage
It's like a lot of the writers I admire had agendas. You know, Aristophanes had everyone. It's like, if you don't have an agenda, then why bother, right?
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David Remnick
One of the most amazing things, one of the theater productions that I wish I had seen, is that you took this play to reading itself. When it had finished at the Public Theater some months ago, you went on a road trip, essentially took everybody to Reading. Tell me the story of that, how it played, how the audience reacted. Why was it different from being in, you know, a stage in New York or Oregon or wherever?
- [13:44]
Kate Wariski
It was a wholly different audience. And what was really exciting is that when the actors came, of course, they were so scared to do it in front of the reading audience. They were worried that they may not seem like people from reading. And so they had so much concern. And through the course of the evening, they were embraced and celebrated. In such a wonderful way.
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David Remnick
How did you feel that?
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Kate Wariski
Well, they were very vocal first off, but also we also had a talk back. But what was interesting to me is how much the acting just slightly changed, and particularly the role of Tracy, because.
- [14:20]
David Remnick
In New York, the white factory worker, who's one of the main characters.
- [14:25]
Kate Wariski
She has to really do quite a balancing act to constantly be liked. So she'll do something that's not really something that people will like, and then she immediately tries to be charming. And it's a real balancing act that she holds. And in Reading, when she said that she was angry at her friend for taking a management job, there was a kind of loyalty that that audience gave her. And so she played the role wildly differently, though it was very close to the same narrative. And so what was interesting is that the journey with that audience was this is the woman who is right. She is right in what she's doing. And then you watch her step by step. And then we go to the scene which I cannot talk about. But what's interesting is there is the audience was so devastated by the end to watch the progression of that thought.
- [15:18]
David Remnick
So interesting. And then you had a talk back at the end of the play, a question and answer session between you guys and the cast as well. What were the questions? Like, what was the back and forth like?
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Lynn Nottage
Well, you know, the thing that was most interesting is that it began as a Q and A, but ultimately it became a testimonial where people stood up, almost like at a revival meeting and told their stories. Like, one woman stood up and she said, basically, thank you. I have been in this situation in which I've actually felt ashamed that I'm not working because it's been what has defined me for so long.
- [15:54]
David Remnick
One of the words that keeps coursing through the play, one of the notions that keeps coursing through the play is visibility and invisibility, no less than it is in Ralph Ellison. And so, in a sense, these people are being seen.
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Jessica Lange
Yes.
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Kate Wariski
But there's also a woman who I thought articulated something beautiful. She said in the Talk Back, she said, everyone gives eight to ten hours a day of their life to something, and all of us have that privilege. But many of us are not seen in what we do for those eight or 10 hours. So thank you for presenting the work that we do for eight to ten hours a day.
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David Remnick
Now, when you were researching this play, Donald Trump was still a kind of jokey real estate guy.
- [16:39]
Kate Wariski
Yes.
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David Remnick
When you went back for the Talk Back and a performance in Reading, he had been elected President of the United States. How has this affected the way we're looking at the play, the way the audience in Reading or New York is looking at the play and your own view of it?
- [16:56]
Kate Wariski
What's interesting is the moment that Trump was elected, the play shifted in meaning, and the actors had done maybe a week or I guess it was three weeks of performance before he was elected. And once he was elected, it became the play that articulated the voice of, quote, unquote, the other side.
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David Remnick
The Trump voter.
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Kate Wariski
Yep. And so people.
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David Remnick
And did that come out in the talkbacks when you went to Reading?
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Jessica Lange
No.
- [17:27]
Lynn Nottage
Interestingly, no.
- [17:30]
David Remnick
Why do you think that is?
- [17:31]
Lynn Nottage
You know, I think people were really very focused on the content of the play and not so much on the politics, because for them, it was not a political play for them, it was a play about their reality.
- [17:43]
David Remnick
Nevertheless, you get the sense that the people whom you talk to in your research are Trump voters. Voters.
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Lynn Nottage
Some of them are, you know, it's 50.
- [17:52]
Jessica Lange
50.
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Lynn Nottage
I'd say it's 50, 50. And even among some of the steelworkers that we interviewed, some of them were, like, staunch Bernie supporters and would never pull the lever for Trump. And then there's some, like, there's one guy in particular who is a staunch Trump voter, but only, you know, as he said, because he wants to keep his gun and he believes that he's going to bring back jobs, not that he philosophically is in alignment with much of what Trump stands for.
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David Remnick
It seems to be almost unfair for the play to be called the play of the first play of the Trump era. It's been around for a while.
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Lynn Nottage
It has.
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David Remnick
But do you sense even in New York, that you're gonna get a different reaction now that it's moved to Broadway because of Trump in the White House?
- [18:37]
Lynn Nottage
You know, I'll say that this Broadway audience has been kind of tremendous in that it surprisingly is more diverse than the audience was at the Public Theater everywhere else. And I also think that it's an audience that doesn't come in with a certain expectations. They sit down and they engage with the play in front of them rather than the play that they've read about. And a lot of those people are from out of town. A lot of the folks are from pockets in the country that are very similar to reading. And so it resonates for them.
- [19:08]
David Remnick
What does that feel like, sitting there last night? Where are you? Are you together? Are you backstage? Are you in the audience? What are you doing? How are you feeling?
- [19:16]
Kate Wariski
We were doing multiple things. I mean, we had like a. I.
- [19:20]
David Remnick
Started a Tumblr of scotch backstage. Nothing like that?
- [19:23]
Kate Wariski
Well, yes, a little bit.
- [19:26]
Lynn Nottage
We actually had a little.
- [19:27]
David Remnick
Your secret is out.
- [19:28]
Lynn Nottage
A little pink champagne.
- [19:30]
Kate Wariski
There was pink champagne.
- [19:32]
David Remnick
Not exactly Keith Richards.
- [19:34]
Lynn Nottage
A little pink champagne.
- [19:36]
David Remnick
That's it.
- [19:37]
Lynn Nottage
That's what we're doing.
- [19:39]
David Remnick
God, you guys live on the walls.
- [19:41]
Jessica Lange
We live right on the edge.
- [19:44]
Kate Wariski
No, but I began watching the show with my son, who is 8 years old. We saw the first two scenes, and then I went down to the green room and I hung out with some of the designers. And then Lynn had watched the first act in. In the theater. And then we met.
- [19:57]
Lynn Nottage
We met and we decided to watch the second act in the drag.
- [20:00]
David Remnick
Half drinking.
- [20:01]
Lynn Nottage
Yeah. Yes, actually sipping pink champagne.
- [20:04]
David Remnick
Well, you deserve it. And do you have any idea, now that it's, well, launched on Broadway, do you know where you're going with the next thing.
- [20:14]
Lynn Nottage
The next play? Yeah, well, I actually have a sequel called Floyd, which is set in Reading, and it's a comedy.
- [20:23]
David Remnick
Well, there's a piece of news.
- [20:26]
Lynn Nottage
And it's.
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Jessica Lange
I.
- [20:27]
Lynn Nottage
You know, I think it's kind of. Yeah. You know, I felt like we need to laugh a little bit now.
- [20:32]
David Remnick
Thank you so much. Lynne and Kate, all the best to you.
- [20:35]
Lynn Nottage
Thank you.
- [20:36]
Kate Wariski
Thank you very much.
- [20:37]
David Remnick
You guys were great. Terrific.
- [20:39]
Lynn Nottage
Thank you.
- [20:40]
Kate Wariski
Thank you.
- [20:43]
David Remnick
Director Kate Wariski and playwright Lynn Nottage, whose PlayStation Sweat just opened on Broadway. Ahead this hour, the early days of fake news. We tend to blame the Internet, but Jelani Cobb is going to tell us about an epidemic of fake news from the days when absolutely everybody still read a newspaper. It's the New Yorker Radio Hour. Stick. This is the New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick. Now we're going to get a little history lesson here. In 1942, the south was on the verge of a rebellion. Black men were stockpiling weapons. The notorious agitator Eleanor Roosevelt was traveling around organizing secret clubs of black domestic workers who were going to turn on their white employers. And the slogan was, not a maid in the kitchen by Christmas. This wasn't some rumor. This was news reported and discussed across the South. It was real. Except that, of course, it wasn't. Historian Joshua Zeiss recently wrote in Politico about this epidemic of what we now call fake news. And he sat down to discuss it with a fellow historian, New Yorker staff writer Jelani Cobb.
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Jelani Cobb
So we've had this conversation now about, you know, the way that our landscape, media landscape, has changed, especially the kind of digital proliferation of rumors and, quote, unquote fake news and so on. But this is obviously very far before the Internet's existence in 1942. How did this information spread?
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Joshua Zeitz
Spread by word of mouth. But I also did a search of Southern newspapers, as many as I could that were digitalized. And it was very clear that the larger city dailies were dismissive of the rumors, if not skeptical of them. But a lot of the small town dailies and weeklies bought into them and affirmed that these rumors were in fact, true. They had heard from reliable sources that Eleanor Roosevelt had been at a town nearby organizing black domestic servants, or that it was definitively true, based on police reports from nearby sheriffs, that African American men were stockpiling pickaxes and other weapons in expectation of an uprising. So a lot of it was word of mouth, but some of it was also spread through the local media, which is a pretty old tradition in American history.
- [23:25]
Jelani Cobb
The historian Richard Hofstadter wrote about this and famously his essay the Paranoid Style of American Politics. And just this is a long tradition of what we would now say, describe as conspiracy theories. And he called it the paranoid style, almost as if it was a kind of artistic expression style, like a school of thought. And he makes this interesting point in that essay, too. He says that the early American conspiracies tended to be about kind of subversive elements trying to undermine American democracy from abroad, that the most dangerous elements are there, that you are being corroded from within. I thought that was fascinating, especially if we're looking at what you were talking about in 1942. What made people susceptible to this idea that this was happening or this would happen to them, that there was a black conspiracy afoot in the South.
- [24:22]
Joshua Zeitz
Well, it's such an important reference because, you know, when Hofstadter was writing, his frame of reference, of course, was the rise of fascism in Europe in the 1930s and McCarthyism in more recent American history. And he looked at these populist movements, oftentimes were so accepting of wild and rife rumor, of a type that were conspiratorial and really improbable on their face. And his point was not that these were aberrations, but that they were deeply ingrained in normative American politics. So when we look at the Comet pizza incident, you know, of January or December of recently, it seems crazy, but it's got plenty of precedent in American history. And I think part of it is that we see these types of fake news pandemics, so to speak, flare up when America, or part of America is undergoing extreme economic or demographic or political change. And it becomes a way for people whose lives are really being upended in ways they have a hard time articulating to explain that change. And that's certainly true of the American south in 1942. To begin with, a good deal of US war manufacturing was focused in the South. When you suddenly had millions of African Americans participating in a cash economy in war production plants. They didn't get the best jobs, but they got jobs that paid cash and took them out of either a cashless sharecropping or tenant farming economy, or took them out of domestic service into better paying war production jobs. They suddenly enjoyed a certain autonomy, both economic and political potentially. You know, there was the prospect that they would take these wages and start paying poll taxes, which had been something that was out of reach before. So this is very destabiliz.
- [26:06]
Jelani Cobb
And poll tax was a mechanism that prevented them from voting.
- [26:10]
Joshua Zeitz
That's right. It prevented many poor whites and blacks in large parts of the south from voting. So there's a lot of. There's just a lot of demographic, economic and political change in the wind. And it was a situation that was really threatening to the old order.
- [26:24]
Jelani Cobb
So the FBI was called to investigate these rumors. And what did they find?
- [26:28]
Joshua Zeitz
Yeah, J. Edgar Hoover wanted to prove them he was no fan of Eleanor Roosevelt's. But they concluded pretty quickly that there was no basis for them. The best that they could figure out was that the rumors, rumors about the Eleanor clubs, about black women organizing the clubs. Their motto was supposed to be a white woman in every kitchen by 1943. Meaning that they were going to completely subvert the south racial order and make domestic servants of their former white employers. The rumor was that they were demanding to be called Mrs. Or Ms. That they were insisting on entering through the front door rather than the service entrance. They were demanding increases in pay as best the FBI could figure out. But the small kernel of truth behind these rumors was the very real fact that many women in domestic service had a surfeit of options. They could go and make better money working as cooks or domestic servants in army camps. They could go work in war production plants. So I think on some level, many white people probably did perceive that their formerly subservient domestic help were suddenly feeling quite empowered.
- [27:34]
Jelani Cobb
One of the other things I think that's interesting is the way that maps onto other kinds of histories. Certainly our history of immigration, We've seen that this conspiratorial thinking has had a kind of correlation to the history of immigration as well.
- [27:52]
Joshua Zeitz
Absolutely. I mean, if you look at the, you know, nativist movement in the 1830s and 1840s, there's a famous episode right outside of Boston, the Charleston fire incident, where a Ursuline convent was burned to the ground. Luckily no one died, but there were rumors that the nuns inside were sexually torturing young Protestant girls. I mean, again, this not too far removed from Pizzagate. America was rife with rumors in the 1890s and early 1900s, and then again right after World War I about Italian and Jewish immigrants. And they were anarchists and they were socialists, and they were again, deeply embedded in and fifth column type threat to the U.S. so, yeah, I think anytime we're in, in this kind of demographic flux, we do tend to see rumor develop into fake news, develop into kind of defining political debate.
- [28:45]
Jelani Cobb
And I think there's a kind of broader thing that I think is equally troubling here, which is that democracy kind of requires that we take rationality for granted. And we've seen these ideas, irrational, outlandish.
- [29:03]
Jessica Lange
False.
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Jelani Cobb
Incredible ideas, gain a significant amount of traction as actually a kind of motive force in people's electoral behavior.
- [29:13]
Joshua Zeitz
I think that's exactly right. I don't know that this is true of every flare up of what we today would call fake news or rumor in American history. But certainly the south in 1942 was the easiest mark for this type of thing. It had, you know, a creaky public education system. Only 10% of Southern children who entered the first grade would go on to graduate from high school. Funding for these schools was deeply inadequate. It had a broken political system. Poll taxes and other mechanisms made voter participation rates the lowest in the country, not just among African Americans, but among working class whites as well. There was a kind of lack of a strong civil society. And so I would argue that, that, you know, it was easier for these rumors to take root and deeper root in the south than in other parts of the country today. We clearly do have a disenfranchisement problem in this country, and it takes many forms. There is, you know, the kind of assault on expertise, whether it's on medical and scientific expertise or the assault on journalism and media. It's taken a toll. And so I think Americans are very distrustful of institutions and experts and. And when you have such weak civil society institutions, not only do rumors and fake news, so to speak, take root, but I think we also become an easy target for outside. I mean, now I sound like the conspiratorial kind of conspiracy theorists I'm talking about, but we do become an easy target for anybody who wants to manipulate that kind of gullibility.
- [30:49]
Jelani Cobb
So what really do you kind of divine from this in terms of how we interact with or what we can see from 1942 and say this is pertinent and relevant to how we approach this vastly more complicated media situation, but sharing some of the same parallels in 2017?
- [31:09]
Joshua Zeitz
I think the bad news, obviously, and you're listening to two historians talk here, is that historians don't have a magic antidote for these types of ailments. So there's no easy way out. But what's helpful when we can find one or two good historical parallels is not that they're going to show us the way out, but that we can look at the same methodology we apply as we study the rumors in 1942 or in an earlier era, look at the conclusions we drew from them and see whether those don't offer a starting point today. You know, I can't with any more ease go back to 1942 and fix the American south than I can tell you how we find our way out here. But I think it's a helpful example 75 years later to look at, to understand people who were both spreading those rumors and who were the target of those rumors. And then it's really up to, I think, you know, activists and political figures to figure out how to fix those, fix those problems.
- [32:11]
David Remnick
The New Yorker's Jelani Cobb talking with the historian Joshua Zeitz. We've got a link to Zeitzes article in politico@newyorkerradio.org in a minute. The New Yorker's Hilton alls sits down with one of the great leading ladies of our time, Jessica Lang. This is the New Yorker Radio Hour. Stick around. This is the New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick. Time just flies. How can it be 40 years since Jessica Lange was first on a movie screen? A wide eyed ingenue making her debut in the clutches of King Kong. Just like that. The ingenue is a grand dungeon. An actress with an incredible list of roles behind her. Now Lange is playing another leading lady, Joan Crawford, in the amazing TV series Feud, directed by Ryan Murphy. Lange co stars with Susan Sarandon, who's Bette Davis. And this show is a look at the psychological toll that Hollywood took on actresses of that generation. Lange recently sat down to talk with the New Yorker's theatre critic. Hilton knows. And they started at the very beginning. Lange dropped out of college in Minnesota to work on a documentary about flamenco dancers. It was the late 60s. Lange was now in Europe, Broke free as a bird and loving every minute of it.
- [34:01]
Jessica Lange
We're driving up in a Land Rover from southern Spain to Amsterdam and came into Paris in May of 1968, which was when the students and workers. And there was the whole revolution basically going on in the city of Paris. And I thought, this is the most thrilling thing I have ever seen in my life, and I want to come back and live in Paris. So about two years later, I did. I moved back to Paris after having become aware of Etienne decroux, who was a great kind of the master mime. Yeah. It wasn't pantomime in the way that you think of Marcel Marceau or, you know, that kind of street mime. This was very classical. And we worked extremely hard on the tiniest little things. And I never wanted to leave, but at some point I thought, well, I've got to go back, because I don't know what I can do with this information. Yeah. And this practice that I'm obsessed with. So I went back to New York, got a job at the Lion's Head, waiting tables, serving drinks to all the crazy writers that were hanging out in there in those days, and started taking acting classes. And somehow with the acting, everything kind of came together. As much as I had loved the mime, it felt like there was something, some element that was not there.
- [35:40]
Hilton Als
Words, do you think?
- [35:42]
Jessica Lange
Yes, I think it was. Because I remember the very first scene I did from the Dutchman Leroy Jones play.
- [35:50]
Hilton Als
Oh, my God, that is one of my favorite. You know, he wrote that in a day.
- [35:55]
Jessica Lange
Did he really?
- [35:55]
Hilton Als
I didn't know that he wrote that play. And it has some of the most extraordinary language about violence, right?
- [36:03]
Jessica Lange
Yes. And the young man that I was working with, we were rehearsing, and this apartment that I was subletting on the ground floor, and we were rehearsing this scene, and suddenly there was, like, this pounding on the door. And one of the neighbors had called the police because they thought that I was in trouble.
- [36:24]
Hilton Als
Whoa.
- [36:25]
Jessica Lange
Because she's accusing him of rape and everything. And so the police came in and was like, so this is the power of text. I get it. And I think really, partly what happened was the idea of voice. When are you going to learn, Edie? You can have your cake and eat it, too. In this life.
- [36:50]
Kate Wariski
No, you can't, Mother darling.
- [36:52]
Jessica Lange
Edie, find a man who will give you a long leash. Get married, and then you can do whatever you want. I remember when I was doing Gray Gardens. I would come to the trailer in the morning Before I'd go into hair and makeup and I would just put on either a DVD or a CD of Big Edie speaking. And it would take me about five or 10 minutes. And I could feel her voice kind of settle down deep inside me. And as soon as that happened, I had the character. But it was always through the voice. Yeah. And the same was true with Joan, although her voice. What became interesting about the voice was the pretense.
- [37:42]
Hilton Als
Yes.
- [37:44]
Jessica Lange
Was the performance.
- [37:46]
Hilton Als
That's right.
- [37:47]
Jessica Lange
Because obviously, I mean, she was from San Antonio, Texas, dirt poor, no education whatsoever. When she talked about coming to Hollywood and first reading scripts, she'd have to sit with a dictionary because she knew so little vocabulary. So when she arrives at mgm, you know, and she's working her way up, suddenly it's talkies and suddenly she's a starlet. And I think she embraced that whole MGM speak 150% so that she could always feel above her station in a way.
- [38:32]
Hilton Als
How does it feel when you. It's. I mean, every character is different, but when you play, quote, unquote, real life persons.
- [38:41]
Jessica Lange
I find, in a way, playing real characters more interesting.
- [38:47]
David Remnick
Mm.
- [38:49]
Jessica Lange
For a couple reasons. One, because it pushes you to get it as perfect, as close to perfect as you can within what you're able to do and what's written. But also it. I mean, for instance, with Joan, which was amazing, was the idea that you were playing Joan Crawford. You were actually Lucille LeSueur playing Joan Crawford.
- [39:20]
Hilton Als
Yes.
- [39:21]
Jessica Lange
So you had layers. You had layers that were happening all the time, simultaneously. Guess what, Betty? I have finally found the perfect project for the two of us. It's always been my dream to work with you. Do you remember how I begged Jack Warner to put us together in Ethan Frome with Mr. Gary Cooper? You do remember. You wanted to play the pretty young servant girl and I was to play the old hag of a wife. Forget it. But this is different. These are the parts of a lifetime. No, thanks, Lucille. I've got plenty of better offers. Bullshit. I know what kind of offers you've been getting. Exactly none. Because the same is true for me. They're not making women's pictures anymore. Not the kind we used to. And for her, the stakes were so high. She never let her guard down in any interview that I ever watched of hers. Except there was a radio interview. She arrived at an airport and she was obviously drunk. The drunk interviews are great. The drunk interviews were really. Whoa. But she was doing her best to be Joan Crawford. And she's talking and she's doing her best MGM speak. And you can hear how hard she's working because she's obviously drunk. And all of a sudden these come up and she turns to them and she says, how are you? Yeah, I don't think you can take the Texas out of them.
- [41:07]
Hilton Als
Tell me, how did the project come about with your adorable Ryan Murphy? Actually, I've been longing to know how you and Ryan started anyway, because it started with American Horror.
- [41:20]
Jessica Lange
Well, that was just out of the blue, really, since I don't watch tv. I wasn't really aware of who Ryan was. But the phone rings. It's Ryan Murphy. And we start talking, and he was so funny. He said, do this with me. He said, I'm going to write you the greatest parts and you're going to win all the awards and. And you'll make a lot of money. And he was like, just one thing after. I mean, he is a master seduction.
- [41:54]
Hilton Als
Yes, yes.
- [41:55]
Jessica Lange
Seducer.
- [41:56]
Hilton Als
Tell me about the great genius Bob Fosse. I love you so much as Angelica. And we're talking about all that jazz.
- [42:05]
Jessica Lange
Yeah.
- [42:06]
Hilton Als
Where Jessica plays the very fetching angel of Death.
- [42:10]
Jessica Lange
Yes. Well. Well, I mean, he saw me in King Kong and where so many people just more or less dismissed me. But Fosse, really, he made a point of reaching out to me and wrote that part for me. Obviously, it was a musical and it was a Fosse musical, and I don't sing or dance or do any of that, but he wanted to. He wanted to help me, I think. So this was what he came up with because that was really the second film I did.
- [42:51]
Hilton Als
It was your second film, wasn't it? Did you know that Meryl Streep had seen Did Laurentiis for King Kong? Did you know that?
- [43:00]
Jessica Lange
People have mentioned that to me over time.
- [43:04]
Hilton Als
And he said something in Italian, thinking that she didn't understand, and she said, I'm sorry I disappoint you.
- [43:11]
Jessica Lange
But, you know, the truth is, he didn't want to test me either.
- [43:14]
Hilton Als
He didn't?
- [43:15]
Jessica Lange
No. I had come back to New York. I was studying with Herbert Berghoff, and I was approached by this Wilhelmina, who's a modeling agent, saying, I understand you're studying acting. We've been contacted by Dino De Laurentiis. They're casting. They want to cast an unknown for the remake of King Kong. I thought, ho, ho, ho. This is not of interest to me at all.
- [43:44]
Hilton Als
But I like my basement with my Dutchman.
- [43:47]
Jessica Lange
That's right. But they were paying for me to fly to California. And I thought, okay, well, I want to get to California because my sister's living on a sailboat out there, and I haven't seen her for a while, so this would be great. I could, like, you know, maybe get on the boat and sail with her for a while.
- [44:07]
Kate Wariski
They.
- [44:07]
Jessica Lange
They took one look at me and were not in the least bit interested. Finally, somebody said, you flew her out there. Just put her on camera. So I went in in the morning and I had a scene to play. Neither the producer nor the director nor the first assistant director. None of the writers. Nobody was there.
- [44:31]
Hilton Als
Oh, no, Jessica?
- [44:32]
Jessica Lange
Yeah. No. And there was just some hair and makeup skeleton crew, and I played a scene, and the next thing I know, they've got the first assistant director there. The first AD comes in and watches, and after lunch, John Gillerman, the director, shows up, and the next thing I know, there's De Laurentiis.
- [44:57]
Hilton Als
Wow.
- [44:59]
Jessica Lange
I mean, they offered me the part before I even left town.
- [45:03]
Hilton Als
And how did you know how to play it to the camera?
- [45:06]
Jessica Lange
I don't think I did. I had this certain naivete, I guess. Lack of self consciousness and not really an awareness. No. Self awareness in doing it.
- [45:22]
Hilton Als
Mm. Do you think that you did become more aware of it as the work went on, or is it something that you can shut out very easily?
- [45:32]
Jessica Lange
Well, now, I mean, the camera becomes almost like a lover in a way. It's that thing of them gazing upon you and you really kind of flowering for them.
- [45:46]
Hilton Als
Yes.
- [45:48]
Jessica Lange
It was different when the director used to be right next to the camera, which was then. It became this kind of alchemy, this exchange of energy. And you were doing it for the camera and for him.
- [46:04]
Hilton Als
He was the audience.
- [46:05]
Jessica Lange
Yes. And there was a, you know, there was a sensual feeling to the scene because his head would be right there next to the lens. And it, you know, once it became Video Village and the director was off in another room, then it all became the camera.
- [46:25]
David Remnick
Yeah.
- [46:26]
Jessica Lange
Mm.
- [46:27]
Hilton Als
Was it hard to be in that reality and to also have children?
- [46:33]
Jessica Lange
Well, yes, it's very difficult, I think. And that's another thing I think we touch on in Feud completely is how do you balance a career and ambition and desire and the need to make a living? How do you balance that with being a good mother? I mean, it was always torturous for me. It really was. I never found a way to do it and feel at ease and that I was doing justice to either one, really. When it came right down to it, the choice was always my children, was always my family. And I think in some way, you know, Your career suffers for that. But in the long run, I'd rather look back and say, oh, I didn't do that part because I didn't want to, you know, whatever, than to say, oh, those were the biggest regrets. Why did I do that and spend that time away?
- [47:44]
David Remnick
Jessica Lange talking with the New Yorker's Hilton Alls. She was recently seen in Louis CK's series Horace and Pete, and she co stars in the series Feud. And to close the show this week, here's the New Yorker's Josh Rothman.
- [48:02]
Josh Rothman
Wait, I'm trying to remember which. Trying to remember which apartment he's in. Oops, sorry, I took us to the wrong floor.
- [48:10]
David Remnick
Josh is a writer and the archives editor for newyorker.com and his interests are wide ranging to, say, the from philosophy to technology to pop culture. His interest in the music made by Joe Williams seems to involve all those things at once.
- [48:27]
Jessica Lange
Hey.
- [48:28]
David Remnick
Hey, Joe.
- [48:28]
Josh Rothman
How's it going? Good to see you. Thanks for having me.
- [48:31]
Joshua Zeitz
Yeah.
- [48:32]
Josh Rothman
Joe's a musician and he makes music under the name motion graphics. Motion graphics is an old term from the early days of computer animation. He came out with an album with that title last year. It's music that, I guess, for lack of a better way of putting it, it sounds like the Internet and you know, that's kind of vague sounding, but there's actually a lot of music that sounds like technology that's part of the history of pop music. So there's, you know, the Beach Boys made a lot of songs that sounded like cars and car collected culture. Kraftwerk made a lot of music that sounded like computers and calculators. You know, pop music reflects the technologies that we're all using. And I just felt that motion graphics really captured something about what the Internet feels like. In this song, it's sort of like a ringtone is interrupting the music, but then it's also like the ringtone is the music. And you know, a lot of Joe's songs, they. They sort of embody the distracted feeling of digital life.
- [49:51]
Joe Williams
I definitely have a short attention span. I definitely, like grew up like ADHD on Riddle and grew up in front of a tv. It's not that different from that. Like, you know, the commercial break, pop ups and advertising, Twitter and aggregated news and it's just normal. Yeah, I didn't set out to make a record about the Internet.
- [50:14]
Josh Rothman
But you did.
- [50:14]
Joe Williams
But it just kind of like. Yeah, exactly.
- [50:37]
Josh Rothman
If you walk into his studio apartment and you look at his setup, what you'll see is a piano keyboard, a synthesizer Keyboard hooked up to his laptop through something called midi. It stands for Musical Instrument Digital Interface. And it basically means that he can associate any sound he wants with the keys on the keyboard. So he's invented a lot of new instruments this way. One of them, as he plays the keyboard, the sound that emerges is different syllables drawn from audiobooks. Another one is, he calls it a scrolling instrument. Basically, as he plays it plays each note using a randomly selected instrument. The same way that as you scroll through your Twitter feed, you just see tweets from random people.
- [51:29]
Joe Williams
Nowadays, like, music made for television and film is done with computers through kind of like this really meticulous sampling. So once it's in the software, you can kind of do things with it that you wouldn't be able to do in real life, like, even if you were a saxophone player. Like.
- [51:50]
Hilton Als
So if you.
- [51:58]
Josh Rothman
So what instrument is that?
- [52:00]
Joe Williams
That's an alto sax. If I hit the piano note harder, it'll play louder. And also, like, if I use the expression.
- [52:14]
Jessica Lange
It'S pretty.
- [52:34]
Josh Rothman
One thought I had on the way in this morning, I was thinking, like, everyone has a computer and a sequencer and a keyboard and a certain set of tools. And actually it is kind of like these are like the folk instruments of the present.
- [52:48]
Lynn Nottage
Like.
- [52:48]
Jessica Lange
Right, right.
- [52:49]
Josh Rothman
It's like you. There was a time when, like, if you were musically interested in music and you were a teenager, you would have a. You'd get a guitar. And obviously people still do get guitars. But now there's also this other thing, this tool that actually, like, everyone has, that has amazing musical possibilities in it that you can teach yourself how to do this from YouTube, basically.
- [53:05]
Jessica Lange
Right? Yeah.
- [53:07]
Joe Williams
It makes total sense to think of the MIDI controller as like a folk instrument. I think that's like, totally true.
- [53:26]
Josh Rothman
You know, if you listen to electronic music from 10 years ago, it sounds really almost science fictional and futuristic. And that's not what's happening with motion graphics. It reflects the fact that we're just surrounded by technology and that the Internet, Internet is just pervasive and everywhere and that it's hard to tell the difference sometimes between interacting with a person with something human or with something digital. Joe's just doing what musicians have been doing for a long time, which is make music that reflects the world as he experiences it.
- [54:14]
David Remnick
The New Yorker's Josh Rothman, he spoke with Joe Williams, who records under the name motion graphics. And that's it for today. Thanks so much for joining us. And if you missed any of the show, you can hear everything we did today on our whole archive. @newyorkerradio.com I'm David Remnick. See you next week.
- [54:37]
Kate Wariski
The New Yorker Radio Hour is a co production of WNYC Studios and the New Yorker. Our theme music was composed and performed by Meryl Garbus of Tune Yards, with additional music by Alexis Quadrado. The New Yorker Radio Hour is supported in part by the Cherina Endowment Fund.