Friday Phone Call # 12
Ellen McLaughlin
I woke up this morning thinking about war and veterans and re-entry and the strange place I feel myself caught in—between wanting to support the individuals while being deeply opposed to the war itself. Ellen’s made a huge body of work focused on the veteran, from her adaptations of Greek plays to her current musical project, Inconnu, and including the recently seen (in NYC) Septimus and Clarissa, which she adapted from Virginia Woolf. I had a sense she’d be able to articulate a response for me to what it was I’ve been feeling. It’s a really powerful conversation. Long, again, because these calls just don’t take fifteen minutes no matter what we do. But stay with it—it keeps expanding and unfolding and turning back to the beginning. And she nails what I was after in several ways.
Listen to weekly podcasts hosted by David Dower as he interviews theater artists from around the country to highlight #newplay bright spots. You can subscribe to the series via iTunes or this RSS Feed (for Android phones).
Listen to weekly podcasts hosted by David Dower as he interviews theater artists from around the country to highlight #newplay bright spots. You can subscribe to the series via Apple iTunes or RSS Feed.
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Thank you, David Dower, for this interview.
'Why?'...
I know so many of us grapple with this.
I started to visit Gary Trudeau's superb and brave blog site, 'The Sandbox',
(http://gocomics.typepad.com... some years ago, to begin to find some sense of an answer.
It's awfully hard reading, sometimes.
But in providing these men and women a forum in which to to engage with their experiences, Trudeau has done what the very best theater does; constructed a space for all of us to witness, learn, grieve, rage and every now and again come to some peace with the complicated answers to that simple, simple question.