Interview w Dale Soules
How did you come to this work? – “this work,” meaning acting.
Well, I've been working in the theater for 59 years. I started when I was 15 or 16, which would have been 1961 or 62, as an apprentice in a summer stock – at two theaters. One in Paramus, New Jersey, which was called the Gladiators Music Arena. And it had been a place from which televised bowling emanated. So our first job as the apprentices was to, first of all, tear up the bowling alleys. You know, even though it's almost 60 years since I did that, I'll never forget it. And that season was produced by the team that produce Godspell and later, Assassins.
I had my first technical jobs with them when I first came to New York, as a props mistress on A View From the Bridge at the Sheraton Square Playhouse. Oh my God. And that was, that was a wonderful education because I had fantastic actors to watch. Who were not names at the time, but: Robert Duvall was playing Eddie and the assistant director was Dustin Hoffman. Arthur Miller was around all the time.
So, it turned out I could not afford to go to Carnegie Mellon, where as an apprentice I had gotten to audition for Larry Cora. And I chose to audition with Amanda in The Glass Menagerie. Oh yeah. And he said, “What are you going to do for me?” You know, I’d stayed up all night and worked on the accent. And he said, oh, okay.... And, I did it, and there was a long silence, which I was sweating through, needless to say. And he said, “Well, I was going to tell you, really you should have chosen to do Laura. But I don't know how you knew -- someone of your age, I wouldn't expect to understand the intricacies, the emotional intricacies, but you get it, so I'm going to offer you right now, a half scholarship to all four years.”
I was of course, elated. And then, when I went back to my high school in the fall and asked my guidance counselor -- who was also the minister's wife, they had us wrapped up on all ends -- could we look up how much the full tuition would be? And we did. And I figured out that if I worked full time and my mom sold the only thing she owned, which was my great-grandmother and grandfather's house, it wouldn't even be enough to make one year. So of course it didn't go any further than that. The guidance counselor didn't say, “Well, let's see what the financial help might be,” which I'm sure I would have been eligible for. But this was just before student loans, right? Like Pell grants -- that kind of thing that didn't exist.
So what happened was: a teacher in my school, Howard Ball -- you know, I was an extremely depressed kid, I was writing suicide poetry. But you know, I loved school! And something in that sparked him. He was a frustrated actor. So Howard Ball told me the story of three plays -- Oklahoma, Brigadoon, and Riders to the Sea -- and asked me which story did I like best. I said, I liked Oklahoma best. And he said, “Which character did you like best?” And I said, “Oh, Aunt Eller,” and he asked why. And I said, “Well, because if she hadn't stopped the fight at the hoedown, everybody would have killed each other. And the play couldn't have gone on.” So I guess, you know, I was a nascent dramaturg.
And he said, “Okay, if you can convince our music teacher,” whose name was Lola Laverne Bevington, great name -- to do the extra work that it would take to do an after-school production of Oklahoma, I could be Aunt Eller. And so we did that, and that's when I got hooked. Because the same kids who walked by me in the hall with their noses in the air and, wouldn't have anything to do with me -- I was kind of considered definitely not popular, my clothes were behind the times, I didn't have the right consumer goods and so forth -- suddenly in the rehearsals, I not only saw them start treating me as an equal, but I saw them start treating each other equally.
So it didn't matter if the captain of the football team was playing Curly or the most beautiful soprano was playing Laurey, what mattered was the whole piece. I saw it turn prejudicial, mean-spirited human beings into cooperative human beings -- because the criteria had changed from who saved you a seat in the lunch room, what kind of car did your father drive, what kind of house did you live in.... to what could you contribute to this cooperative effort? And that was a great leveler. And I thought, if it can do this, this is for me. And I didn't care what job I did. I really didn't care. I loved being able to be on stage and tell the story. And of course I love the fact that I seemed to have a natural ability, along with what I learned. Howard Ball was very serious, you know, he gave us Stanislavski and Boleslavsky, you know, “The First Six Lessons.”
So that one teacher -- he really made all the difference. If I hadn't had him, I never would have imagined a life in the theater. I didn't even know really what it was, you know? Not that I think everybody is equipped to carry the baggage that we carry. Well, I mean we're all equipped to carry some kinds of bags. I've never met anyone, no matter what their intellectual capacity or emotional capacity or physical capacity, who didn't have a desire or ability to take pleasure from doing creative work, whether it's drawing or building or poetry or telling a story. Given some very simple, basic tools and the idea that they have it in them. Yeah. It’s the barriers -- those are the things I would like to break down.
Howard also helped me get the interview for my first apprenticeship.
The second apprenticeship was at the Barn Theater in Augusta, Michigan. I learned the backstage in my two years there, you know, I learned how to call a show. I learned how to hang lights. I giggled about “Bastard Amber,” or, you know, the classic, when they give you a whole pile of lighting gels and say, “Go wash them.”Certain things just stick. I learned how to do props. I learned how to do sound. I learned how to do a lot of things. So when it happened that I couldn't afford to go to college, I said, okay, mom, I'm gonna go to New York and see if I can make my living.
And so after that second apprenticeship in Paramus, you know, I had worked very hard that summer, and they said, do you know when you're getting ready to come to the city give us a call. So I did. And, they needed a props mistress for their View from the Bridge, and that was my, that was my first job. I joined the union as a stage manager initially. Yeah. I did costumes, I ushered, I ran the lights on “The Boys in the Band,” the original production -- you know, many, many things.
And then I saw Hair. Right.
I was bound and determined to be part of that -- to get into that. I really wanted to be part of that. And I did succeed, after two years of auditioning – I went in about 24 times. The funny part about that is -- often when I've taught as a visiting artist, I always say, “You really have no control over what criteria you're being judged on. The only thing you have any control over is the work that you put into the audition. So, you know, that's the thing to concentrate on.” Because in case of Hair, eventually I found out that one of the reasons that I had continuously been called back but not hired was that there was a company astrologer on Hair.
No.
Yeah. And my signs didn't sync up with the rest of the cast. And when they finally hired me, it was because there was a casting emergency, and it had nothing to do with birth signs. In fact, they put me into the show the same night they hired me -- that was a terrifying experience.
It's so funny because people audition for stuff, you know, one, two, three times, and they're like out, like, “Come on already.” You don't realize how much stamina is required of you. Because it seems so hard, but you just have to have an open door policy on exactly how many attempts you're going to make.
So how did you get involved with this podcast, and who do you play?
Oh yeah. Well, Florencia Lazano thought of me for Buck [Victoria Woodhull’s father]. There's no doubt that Buck has the worst reputation of anyone involved in the Woodhull story, he has become a grotesque caricature. There was also no doubt that he was a many-faceted individual, often an opportunist, with an entrepreneurial bent. He had his faults, but it has to be remembered that he was the father of two of the most remarkable women of the Gilded Qge, Victoria Woodhull and Tennessee Claflin. So how much of the story is about how one remembers their own history? And then how other people have recorded it -- and then how we receive it.
What are you working on now? What is your next step?
For quite some time, I’ve been working on stories about my family. I must have been writing this stuff for, you know, 40 years – a really long time -- and I could never figure out what the form should be. And It turned out that the easiest way for me to get it up and out was for me to perform it.
OK, last question: Who would you like to be haunted by?
Ruth Draper, the monologuist -- who was born like one year before Buck Claflin! That isn't why I’d want to be haunted by her -- I've been a fan of her since I first heard of her and listened to tapes, and it was like, “Oh my God. Yes, this, this was a way!”
And Emily Dickinson. I like the two things that I know she's very famous for, “Hope is the thing with feathers.” And “If I can stop one heart from breaking, I shall not live in vain.” I love that. I feel that way. And: “Forever is composed of now.”
And Louis Pasteur, who said -- there are several translations of this quote, but -- “Chance favors the prepared mind.” I think that's very true.
You know, I can think of so many things that have occurred to me, ideas to put out into the world, and that I haven't done it -- and then I see them come out into the world anyway through someone else’s work. I've never felt that jealous or angry when that happens; my response to that is I just wasn't ready, and the idea moved on to another consciousness.
Whoa. Interesting. So you can be haunted by an idea and if you aren't ready to embody it...
...it moves on. It does! And I think that's fine, because if you're not ready, something that comes to you -- whether it's an idea, or a piece of luck career-wise, or a house, or a job, whatever it is, if you're not prepared to take care of it, and own it, and understand it, and try and do something with it, it's going to move on!
Oh God, now you just lit a fire under my butt. I've got like three ideas that I've just been sitting on. OK, my real last question is about this inflection point that we find ourselves in now, where finally some entrenched power structures are being challenged. And I am curious about your point of view, the perspective of a working actress. What's one concrete thing that you see as a possible way to move the needle in the direction of equalizing power structures in our field?
OK. Here we go. I remember it being about 1981 that ticket prices on Broadway had taken a huge leap, from like $25 for the very best seat in the house on a Saturday night to $40. I remember sitting backstage with tears rolling down my cheeks. The theater had saved my life without a doubt, showed me that I could be accepted. So the idea that people like me couldn't afford to come in and see me, was just beyond. And I knew I wasn't going to be able to change it from the inside. So I came up with an idea, I went out on the road for almost 9 years with affiliate artists, with a non-profit producer. They took on about a hundred artists of various stripes. You wrote your own piece and then you went out on the road and did residencies all over, for people in places where theater might not otherwise be seen, like on a factory floor. We did two shows a day, six days a week. We were making theater accessible. Nowadays, we’d maybe call that like a lecture-demonstration, where you're talking about what you do, why you do it and showing how you do it. And then you do it. And you're interacting very specifically with the audience. There was no gulf of anonymity between us and the audience.
And this really solidified what I had real always thought, which was that this gulf between the artist and the general population is one that really needs to be bridged. Because, we are seen often as special, outside the mainstream. That’s exceptionalism, and I'd like to dismiss that in any way that I can, in a real way.
So I had this idea for the Community Stories Project.
Because I always dropped in to the audience, and they always talked to me. Not substantively out loud in the session, but always afterwards -- whether I was performing for a sixth grade class, or businessmen at a Lions club, or, you know, the audience at the sheep arena at the Guernsey county fair, or the Black mayors conference, an amazing, huge cross-section of age, race, socioeconomic status, people! No matter where I was, people came to me after the show to say, oh yeah, we had an outhouse too. Or they'd show me their wrist scars, tell me they’d tried to....just always very, very personal. Everyone has a story. And you don't want to be run out of town on a rail for having told it.
The basic idea is to make theater more a part of the community, and the community more a part of the theater. So I came up with this idea [the Community Stories Project]. It was about 1987. Step one was I would go do a performance, tell my story, because that seemed to be what opened people up to it. And then I would offer them a sign-up sheet in the back of the room and say, if you have something that you'd like to talk about -- no subject parameter whatsoever -- if you want to come and talk to me about knitting, that's okay, gardening, organization, whatever it might be, your children. Unlike Studs Terkel, whom I adore and is a real hero of mine, who would ask a specific question and then write a piece around that -- if they signed up, we'd take the conversation. A conversation -- I won't sit there like Freud. I may say, for example, oh yeah, my father was an alcoholic too. We tape it. I then listen to those tapes and look for the theme that keeps repeating itself without my bidding. And then we’d have professional writers write a piece on the theme, not necessarily lifting anything directly from the tape. Then I would contact the person who told their story.
This was all in a contract, by the way. They were protected completely. They own the material. They could say yes or no to their words being used, or they could say, for example, that we could use it, “But I don't want to be identified.” Or they can say, “Yes, and I want credit!” Credit is important if people are seeking that. And ownership very important. That was probably the most important, and the most difficult in terms of funding, because whomever funds it wants to own that material. You know, it drives me crazy.
And the next element of it was that, if we ever got to the production, each person who had participated was invited to become part of that production, in any way that they chose. So it would be a combination of lay people and professional people who would be working together and learning from each other.
Anyway. I talked to Danny Sullivan about this idea. I flew myself out there [to Seattle Rep] when he was the Artistic Director, we’d worked together on Hair. And he liked the idea, so the tapes would be kept in a library at the Seattle Repertory Theater. They made it so that people could go at certain hours during the course of the week and listen to the tape. Or they could control the permission for a family member in perpetuity, if for example they didn't want their grandchild to hear it until they were 20. They retained control. I got maybe 300 tapes and analyzed them and found the recurring theme. I just was coming back to New York to find writers because that's where my real contacts were. [ed. Note: Here Dale tells a personal story about financial struggle over her apartment that details why this amazing project never came to full fruition. Someone please fund this idea.]
I did end up doing a pilot project of it at New York Theater Workshop. I didn't give it up. I tried. And then I saw it was just going to take the rest of my life and I don't have enough money to finance it. I was ready for it to be the rest of my life.
A lot of theaters are trying to think about that, and about how to be storytellers and be part of a social change. I do believe that theater is a strong vehicle for social change. I probably wouldn't be here without it, you know, personally. If it wasn't as effective as it is, you wouldn't see countries banning it, right? Why bother? Why bother banning it if it has no power to be dangerous?
But in the meantime, of course, I'm like everybody else. I'm just, you know, self-taping myself to high heaven.
Well, I've been working in the theater for 59 years. I started when I was 15 or 16, which would have been 1961 or 62, as an apprentice in a summer stock – at two theaters. One in Paramus, New Jersey, which was called the Gladiators Music Arena. And it had been a place from which televised bowling emanated. So our first job as the apprentices was to, first of all, tear up the bowling alleys. You know, even though it's almost 60 years since I did that, I'll never forget it. And that season was produced by the team that produce Godspell and later, Assassins.
I had my first technical jobs with them when I first came to New York, as a props mistress on A View From the Bridge at the Sheraton Square Playhouse. Oh my God. And that was, that was a wonderful education because I had fantastic actors to watch. Who were not names at the time, but: Robert Duvall was playing Eddie and the assistant director was Dustin Hoffman. Arthur Miller was around all the time.
So, it turned out I could not afford to go to Carnegie Mellon, where as an apprentice I had gotten to audition for Larry Cora. And I chose to audition with Amanda in The Glass Menagerie. Oh yeah. And he said, “What are you going to do for me?” You know, I’d stayed up all night and worked on the accent. And he said, oh, okay.... And, I did it, and there was a long silence, which I was sweating through, needless to say. And he said, “Well, I was going to tell you, really you should have chosen to do Laura. But I don't know how you knew -- someone of your age, I wouldn't expect to understand the intricacies, the emotional intricacies, but you get it, so I'm going to offer you right now, a half scholarship to all four years.”
I was of course, elated. And then, when I went back to my high school in the fall and asked my guidance counselor -- who was also the minister's wife, they had us wrapped up on all ends -- could we look up how much the full tuition would be? And we did. And I figured out that if I worked full time and my mom sold the only thing she owned, which was my great-grandmother and grandfather's house, it wouldn't even be enough to make one year. So of course it didn't go any further than that. The guidance counselor didn't say, “Well, let's see what the financial help might be,” which I'm sure I would have been eligible for. But this was just before student loans, right? Like Pell grants -- that kind of thing that didn't exist.
So what happened was: a teacher in my school, Howard Ball -- you know, I was an extremely depressed kid, I was writing suicide poetry. But you know, I loved school! And something in that sparked him. He was a frustrated actor. So Howard Ball told me the story of three plays -- Oklahoma, Brigadoon, and Riders to the Sea -- and asked me which story did I like best. I said, I liked Oklahoma best. And he said, “Which character did you like best?” And I said, “Oh, Aunt Eller,” and he asked why. And I said, “Well, because if she hadn't stopped the fight at the hoedown, everybody would have killed each other. And the play couldn't have gone on.” So I guess, you know, I was a nascent dramaturg.
And he said, “Okay, if you can convince our music teacher,” whose name was Lola Laverne Bevington, great name -- to do the extra work that it would take to do an after-school production of Oklahoma, I could be Aunt Eller. And so we did that, and that's when I got hooked. Because the same kids who walked by me in the hall with their noses in the air and, wouldn't have anything to do with me -- I was kind of considered definitely not popular, my clothes were behind the times, I didn't have the right consumer goods and so forth -- suddenly in the rehearsals, I not only saw them start treating me as an equal, but I saw them start treating each other equally.
So it didn't matter if the captain of the football team was playing Curly or the most beautiful soprano was playing Laurey, what mattered was the whole piece. I saw it turn prejudicial, mean-spirited human beings into cooperative human beings -- because the criteria had changed from who saved you a seat in the lunch room, what kind of car did your father drive, what kind of house did you live in.... to what could you contribute to this cooperative effort? And that was a great leveler. And I thought, if it can do this, this is for me. And I didn't care what job I did. I really didn't care. I loved being able to be on stage and tell the story. And of course I love the fact that I seemed to have a natural ability, along with what I learned. Howard Ball was very serious, you know, he gave us Stanislavski and Boleslavsky, you know, “The First Six Lessons.”
So that one teacher -- he really made all the difference. If I hadn't had him, I never would have imagined a life in the theater. I didn't even know really what it was, you know? Not that I think everybody is equipped to carry the baggage that we carry. Well, I mean we're all equipped to carry some kinds of bags. I've never met anyone, no matter what their intellectual capacity or emotional capacity or physical capacity, who didn't have a desire or ability to take pleasure from doing creative work, whether it's drawing or building or poetry or telling a story. Given some very simple, basic tools and the idea that they have it in them. Yeah. It’s the barriers -- those are the things I would like to break down.
Howard also helped me get the interview for my first apprenticeship.
The second apprenticeship was at the Barn Theater in Augusta, Michigan. I learned the backstage in my two years there, you know, I learned how to call a show. I learned how to hang lights. I giggled about “Bastard Amber,” or, you know, the classic, when they give you a whole pile of lighting gels and say, “Go wash them.”Certain things just stick. I learned how to do props. I learned how to do sound. I learned how to do a lot of things. So when it happened that I couldn't afford to go to college, I said, okay, mom, I'm gonna go to New York and see if I can make my living.
And so after that second apprenticeship in Paramus, you know, I had worked very hard that summer, and they said, do you know when you're getting ready to come to the city give us a call. So I did. And, they needed a props mistress for their View from the Bridge, and that was my, that was my first job. I joined the union as a stage manager initially. Yeah. I did costumes, I ushered, I ran the lights on “The Boys in the Band,” the original production -- you know, many, many things.
And then I saw Hair. Right.
I was bound and determined to be part of that -- to get into that. I really wanted to be part of that. And I did succeed, after two years of auditioning – I went in about 24 times. The funny part about that is -- often when I've taught as a visiting artist, I always say, “You really have no control over what criteria you're being judged on. The only thing you have any control over is the work that you put into the audition. So, you know, that's the thing to concentrate on.” Because in case of Hair, eventually I found out that one of the reasons that I had continuously been called back but not hired was that there was a company astrologer on Hair.
No.
Yeah. And my signs didn't sync up with the rest of the cast. And when they finally hired me, it was because there was a casting emergency, and it had nothing to do with birth signs. In fact, they put me into the show the same night they hired me -- that was a terrifying experience.
It's so funny because people audition for stuff, you know, one, two, three times, and they're like out, like, “Come on already.” You don't realize how much stamina is required of you. Because it seems so hard, but you just have to have an open door policy on exactly how many attempts you're going to make.
So how did you get involved with this podcast, and who do you play?
Oh yeah. Well, Florencia Lazano thought of me for Buck [Victoria Woodhull’s father]. There's no doubt that Buck has the worst reputation of anyone involved in the Woodhull story, he has become a grotesque caricature. There was also no doubt that he was a many-faceted individual, often an opportunist, with an entrepreneurial bent. He had his faults, but it has to be remembered that he was the father of two of the most remarkable women of the Gilded Qge, Victoria Woodhull and Tennessee Claflin. So how much of the story is about how one remembers their own history? And then how other people have recorded it -- and then how we receive it.
What are you working on now? What is your next step?
For quite some time, I’ve been working on stories about my family. I must have been writing this stuff for, you know, 40 years – a really long time -- and I could never figure out what the form should be. And It turned out that the easiest way for me to get it up and out was for me to perform it.
OK, last question: Who would you like to be haunted by?
Ruth Draper, the monologuist -- who was born like one year before Buck Claflin! That isn't why I’d want to be haunted by her -- I've been a fan of her since I first heard of her and listened to tapes, and it was like, “Oh my God. Yes, this, this was a way!”
And Emily Dickinson. I like the two things that I know she's very famous for, “Hope is the thing with feathers.” And “If I can stop one heart from breaking, I shall not live in vain.” I love that. I feel that way. And: “Forever is composed of now.”
And Louis Pasteur, who said -- there are several translations of this quote, but -- “Chance favors the prepared mind.” I think that's very true.
You know, I can think of so many things that have occurred to me, ideas to put out into the world, and that I haven't done it -- and then I see them come out into the world anyway through someone else’s work. I've never felt that jealous or angry when that happens; my response to that is I just wasn't ready, and the idea moved on to another consciousness.
Whoa. Interesting. So you can be haunted by an idea and if you aren't ready to embody it...
...it moves on. It does! And I think that's fine, because if you're not ready, something that comes to you -- whether it's an idea, or a piece of luck career-wise, or a house, or a job, whatever it is, if you're not prepared to take care of it, and own it, and understand it, and try and do something with it, it's going to move on!
Oh God, now you just lit a fire under my butt. I've got like three ideas that I've just been sitting on. OK, my real last question is about this inflection point that we find ourselves in now, where finally some entrenched power structures are being challenged. And I am curious about your point of view, the perspective of a working actress. What's one concrete thing that you see as a possible way to move the needle in the direction of equalizing power structures in our field?
OK. Here we go. I remember it being about 1981 that ticket prices on Broadway had taken a huge leap, from like $25 for the very best seat in the house on a Saturday night to $40. I remember sitting backstage with tears rolling down my cheeks. The theater had saved my life without a doubt, showed me that I could be accepted. So the idea that people like me couldn't afford to come in and see me, was just beyond. And I knew I wasn't going to be able to change it from the inside. So I came up with an idea, I went out on the road for almost 9 years with affiliate artists, with a non-profit producer. They took on about a hundred artists of various stripes. You wrote your own piece and then you went out on the road and did residencies all over, for people in places where theater might not otherwise be seen, like on a factory floor. We did two shows a day, six days a week. We were making theater accessible. Nowadays, we’d maybe call that like a lecture-demonstration, where you're talking about what you do, why you do it and showing how you do it. And then you do it. And you're interacting very specifically with the audience. There was no gulf of anonymity between us and the audience.
And this really solidified what I had real always thought, which was that this gulf between the artist and the general population is one that really needs to be bridged. Because, we are seen often as special, outside the mainstream. That’s exceptionalism, and I'd like to dismiss that in any way that I can, in a real way.
So I had this idea for the Community Stories Project.
Because I always dropped in to the audience, and they always talked to me. Not substantively out loud in the session, but always afterwards -- whether I was performing for a sixth grade class, or businessmen at a Lions club, or, you know, the audience at the sheep arena at the Guernsey county fair, or the Black mayors conference, an amazing, huge cross-section of age, race, socioeconomic status, people! No matter where I was, people came to me after the show to say, oh yeah, we had an outhouse too. Or they'd show me their wrist scars, tell me they’d tried to....just always very, very personal. Everyone has a story. And you don't want to be run out of town on a rail for having told it.
The basic idea is to make theater more a part of the community, and the community more a part of the theater. So I came up with this idea [the Community Stories Project]. It was about 1987. Step one was I would go do a performance, tell my story, because that seemed to be what opened people up to it. And then I would offer them a sign-up sheet in the back of the room and say, if you have something that you'd like to talk about -- no subject parameter whatsoever -- if you want to come and talk to me about knitting, that's okay, gardening, organization, whatever it might be, your children. Unlike Studs Terkel, whom I adore and is a real hero of mine, who would ask a specific question and then write a piece around that -- if they signed up, we'd take the conversation. A conversation -- I won't sit there like Freud. I may say, for example, oh yeah, my father was an alcoholic too. We tape it. I then listen to those tapes and look for the theme that keeps repeating itself without my bidding. And then we’d have professional writers write a piece on the theme, not necessarily lifting anything directly from the tape. Then I would contact the person who told their story.
This was all in a contract, by the way. They were protected completely. They own the material. They could say yes or no to their words being used, or they could say, for example, that we could use it, “But I don't want to be identified.” Or they can say, “Yes, and I want credit!” Credit is important if people are seeking that. And ownership very important. That was probably the most important, and the most difficult in terms of funding, because whomever funds it wants to own that material. You know, it drives me crazy.
And the next element of it was that, if we ever got to the production, each person who had participated was invited to become part of that production, in any way that they chose. So it would be a combination of lay people and professional people who would be working together and learning from each other.
Anyway. I talked to Danny Sullivan about this idea. I flew myself out there [to Seattle Rep] when he was the Artistic Director, we’d worked together on Hair. And he liked the idea, so the tapes would be kept in a library at the Seattle Repertory Theater. They made it so that people could go at certain hours during the course of the week and listen to the tape. Or they could control the permission for a family member in perpetuity, if for example they didn't want their grandchild to hear it until they were 20. They retained control. I got maybe 300 tapes and analyzed them and found the recurring theme. I just was coming back to New York to find writers because that's where my real contacts were. [ed. Note: Here Dale tells a personal story about financial struggle over her apartment that details why this amazing project never came to full fruition. Someone please fund this idea.]
I did end up doing a pilot project of it at New York Theater Workshop. I didn't give it up. I tried. And then I saw it was just going to take the rest of my life and I don't have enough money to finance it. I was ready for it to be the rest of my life.
A lot of theaters are trying to think about that, and about how to be storytellers and be part of a social change. I do believe that theater is a strong vehicle for social change. I probably wouldn't be here without it, you know, personally. If it wasn't as effective as it is, you wouldn't see countries banning it, right? Why bother? Why bother banning it if it has no power to be dangerous?
But in the meantime, of course, I'm like everybody else. I'm just, you know, self-taping myself to high heaven.
This interview was conducted by Kyra Miller, 2021.
