The Rise and Fall of Theatre X

Jeffrey Mosser: Welcome to another episode of the From The Ground Up podcast produced for HowlRound Theatre Commons, a free and open platform for theatremakers worldwide. I'm your host, Jeffrey Mosser, recording from the ancestral homeland of the Potawatomi, Ho-Chunk, and Menominee, now known as Milwaukee, Wisconsin. These episodes are shared digitally to the internet. Let's take a moment to consider the legacy of colonization embedded within the technology, structure, and ways of thinking that we use every day. We are using equipment and high-speed internet not available in many indigenous communities. Even the technologies that are central to much of the work we make leaves a significant carbon footprint contributing to climate change that disproportionately affects indigenous people worldwide. I invite you to join me in acknowledging the truth and violence perpetrated in the name of this country as well as our shared responsibility to make good of this time and for each of us to consider our roles in reconciliation, decolonization, and allyship.

Dear artists, one thing that I am endlessly fascinated with is how theatres begin. So often it comes out of a need for stories, for politics, for practice, and in the case of Theatre X, was all three. They were faculty and students who were excited to create content by ways of devising and improvising a product of experimentation in the 1960s. Today, playwright John Schneider is going to take us through that process from beginning to end. A soup-to-nuts conversation and story and history of Theatre X as he lays out how this theatre made an intense impact on the community of Milwaukee and the international scene. Excavating the early American theatre ensemble is something we need to pay vital attention to, and we're lucky that there is a great deal of scholarship out there on some of the more nationally known companies. In December 2022, the SITI Company sunset their performances after thirty years and now exist as an archive and resource.

This announcement put the question in the air for me, what has been documented about these late 20th century theatre companies? Theatre X is one of those companies that ended their operations, but still were a resounding example of American cultural export using an ensemble-based approach. At the top of this interview, John Schneider handed me a copy of Mike Van Den Heuvel's American Theatre Ensembles Volume One, which I hadn't gotten my hands on yet. You may have heard in season four, episode three, Allen Kuharski mentions Mike's name as a presenter. And in this volume he includes Theatre X, alongside Mabou Mines and the Rude Mechanicals and more. I recommend you give it a read. It's chock-full of great scholarly digests as well as the context of America at the time of this particular wave of ensemble theatre. Mike, if you're listening, I do hope we get a chance to chat for this podcast sometime soon.

John leads off this conversation by talking about Curtis Carter who wrote the piece on Theatre X in Mike's book. Beyond this, though, there is very little scholarship about Theatre X's cultural contributions. John and I take several detours and I have kept them all in as I feel like these connections are important to the theatrical fabric of ensemble work and Theatre X. We mention several key figures and organizations that I will create links to on the transcripts page of this episode at howlround.com, which please allow me to say I love generating these sorts of footnotes for all of our collector of future research. We are going to be discussing Eric Bentley, Conrad Bishop, Ron Gural, the Body Politic, Mickery Theater in Amsterdam, Ritsaert ten Cate, Flora Coker, Sarah [Tonen] O'Connor, SITI Company, Mabou Mines, Wooster Group, David Herskovits and Target Margin Theater, The NEA Four, Mark Anderson and Isabelle Kralj, Theatre Gigante, David Schweizer, and Quasimondo Physical Theatre.

Before we launch into this, one other bit of context that I'd like to say is that I want to acknowledge that very often I interview artistic directors or figureheads of each organization. Let me acknowledge that it is a bit odd to talk about collective creation one-on-one. Therein John's perspective is his own, and should we interview other members within his story, members of Theatre X or even the prevalent board members mentioned, I am certain that we would get another fascinating angle on their process. That said, I feel very grateful to have captured John's point of view. Okay, let's get into it. I caught John on a very cold day on March 22nd, 2023 at Marquette University, which is on traditional Potawatomi, Ho-Chunk, and Menominee land, now known as Milwaukee, Wisconsin. Enjoy.

John Schneider: You know this book?

Jeffrey: Yes. Yeah, this is great.

John: We're in there.

Jeffrey: Honestly, I haven't been able to read this yet. I haven't picked this up yet.

John: You want to borrow it?

Jeffrey: Do I? Yeah, I absolutely do.

John: Please.

Jeffrey: How do you know Curtis Carter here, or did you know him?

John: Yeah, Curtis is a very dear friend. He's the guy who created the Haggerty Art Museum on campus. Gee, thirty years ago, I want to say. He teaches in the philosophy department. He's a long-time tenured faculty member of the philosophy department at Marquette University, and he was a member of Theatre X's board of directors for many years, and he's partly responsible... He's one of the board members that's responsible for the fact that we built a theatre in the Third Ward in an empty warehouse, which was the foundation of what's now the Broadway Theatre Center and the foundation of what made the Third Ward a nationally important center for the arts. We did that and we were there for about twenty years, and so Curtis and I have been close friends for a long time.

Jeffrey: Oh, that's great.

John: And the fellow who edited that book knew that, and when the publisher Methuen asked him to do it, he said, I will only do it if you will include Theatre X in it, because he knew our work and valued our work, and that is what excited him actually, rather than just including New York groups, having something from Milwaukee.

Jeffrey: Well, you're included among, Lookingglass [Theatre Company] is in here and Goat Island, so Chicago is in here too, right? So there's some. And then Mike does a great job in the other volumes to interview, oh my gosh, the only theatre that pops out in my head right now is Rude Mechanicals and among others and so many others.

John: Rude Mechs?

Jeffrey: Yeah, yeah, yeah. Which is probably my first theatre ensemble that I was like, oh my gosh. Maybe I don't know how to start.

John: It's only by accident that I had that in my bag.

Jeffrey: That's so great. I've been thinking about that for so long. It's great.

John: We're kind of at the point in the theatre appreciation class that I'm teaching, at which I'm beginning, I just sort of got through their early twentieth century avant-garde. And we're just sort of at the verge of the independent theatre movement alternative, experimental theatre movement in America. So I brought that along with me to class today, which is why it's in my bag.

Jeffrey: I am really curious how you categorize that as like we've gone through this period and then we come into this period of ensemble-based or collaborative work. Do you have a particular definition that you use or when you talk to your students, what is it like to break it up into those sections or what does it mean to break it up into those sections?

What they were all looking for was a different way to make theatre.

John: I present it as the historical inspiration for a different way of thinking about theatre than most places were accustomed to using when they thought about theatre, a different way of working. And basically it's a history and opening up of doors, I think. And this could bring us to the beginning of Theatre X, if you don't mind my jumping to that. It was a small group, I think six faculty members at the University of Wisconsin in Milwaukee, who independently from the university decided to get together at ten o'clock at night or whenever they all were free to do it in this or that room at the university and improvise. And they took turns being the person who was responsible to come up with the improv idea for that night, and they came into the room and they got the improv idea from that person, and they went to it until they decided it was time to quit, and they didn't even necessarily talk about it immediately, but what they were all looking for was a different way to make theatre, a different way to do theatre.

They were inspired, of course, by for example, The Living Theatre, The Open Theater, groups which were already around, and they had no taste of any theatre like that in the university setting at that time. A couple of them were theatre faculty, but there was also a dance person and an artist, visual artist person. And then some students got interested in what they were doing and said, “can we join?” And they said, “no, because we've got this thing going and we don’t kind of want to start over with new young people to whom we'd constantly feel like we had to be teachers and explain everything to.”

“But we can help you start one with your student group. We'll tell you what we're doing and you can try it.” So then it was getting around the department that something was going on, and so the dance faculty member put a little manifesto on the bulletin board in the theatre saying, we are Theatre X, the Algebra X, meaning theatre, the unknown, meaning theatre, we don't know what we are, fill in the blank. And that was in the spring semester in 1969, and then they separated for, the summer came, and then when the fall came, a few of them wanted to do it, but they didn't want to just repeat what they had been doing. So they took this name Theatre X, they combined students and faculty, the ones who wanted to try it, and they said, well, let's make a show. And they made a show and it was a series of short pieces, and mostly comic, that addressed issues that were of great concern to them personally, such as the Vietnam War and Civil Rights.

And they found ways to make their points very strongly, points that they could believe in, very strongly that were still creative and funny and kind of group produced. One of them was a skilled writer, and not in every case, but in many cases would actually write a little script in the course of making it. That was Conrad Bishop. And they picked a date and they found a place off campus, the Village Church it was called, that just had a big room, and they put signs up all over saying, Theatre X is going to produce, they called it X Communication and this show on these dates at this time, at this place.

In order to force themselves to have a performance ready to present. And they did that in the late fall of 1969, and it was a big hit. It was mostly a student audience, a audience of friends. Because they were making theatre about what mattered to people, and because they were putting their hearts out there, because they were taking a risk because there hadn't never been anything like this done in Milwaukee before, even though it was not very well known or very well publicized.

But then that inspired them to keep going. And the next thing that happened was incredibly significant and important too. This is before I joined, by the way, I was still in college at a different college studying theatre and not knowing what I was going to do with my life, but if I can jump in, I started a little theatre company of my own at my college to do the same thing that they were doing here, and we actually made some original work and we somehow or another managed to get into cars and bring our original work from Green Bay, which is where we were, to Milwaukee, to present it at UWM under the auspices of somebody, I don't know, not Theatre X, I guess the theatre department, but somebody had it.

So anyway, we turned out to be a perfect match once I graduated. Back to the story, what happened after X Communication was the theatre department at Marquette decided to have the first International Brecht Symposium, and they organized that, and they of course invited Eric Bentley, who translated Brecht into English and without whom, I don't know if we would have Brecht. We certainly wouldn't have had him then. Invited him to be the keynote speaker at this international conference. Eric Bentley said, well, hey, I just finished translating The Measures Taken, which is one of Brecht's learning plays, and I have the original score by Hanns Eisler, which has never been performed since the 1930s when this thing was done in Germany, when Brecht wrote it.

So you can have the original music and you can have the first English presentation of The Measures Taken. The theatre department at Marquette University that was having this thing said, "Oh, no, we don't want to do that. We can't do that. We have something else we want to present, and we're working on other things and we're too busy. We can't." And the faculty members of the department who were members of Theatre X went, "oh, we'll do it." And they did. And they got together enough of a cast of students, and one of the members, the wife of Conrad Bishop [Elizabeth Fuller], who was the one with writing skills, was also a composer and had music skills, and so she could teach the music and conduct it with the singing parts of it, and they did at this international Brecht Symposium, so they had people from other countries there too.

They did a bang up ensemble created production of Brecht's The Measures Taken that Brecht would've jumped up and cheered for, as did Eric Bentley and that audience. So it was written about in international theatre journals, for example, and Eric Bentley talked about how great it was, and it introduced this play that had never been done in English or probably ever since Brecht originally did it. And it's a great play, fairly tough play, and it also fit really well with what was going on in the country at the time in terms of trying to end the Vietnam War.

And it ended with, as Brecht's learning plays did, which is what Brecht wanted, it being turned over to the audience. So it created a problem. It created a big social-political question and then went, okay, ladies and gentlemen, what are we going to do about this? And so every performance of The Measures Taken ended with this discussion with the whole audience talking in particular about how we're going to end the Vietnam War. My first performance with Theatre X then, when I joined it in 1970, was their revival of this production off of the campus grounds for a long-run downtown Milwaukee in a coffeehouse. And so that was the beginnings of my time with Theatre X.

And over the next couple years, we got still largely led by Conrad Bishop and his wife, who at that time, her name was Linda Bishop, now she's Elizabeth Fuller, and they are now The Independent Eye. They were expecting their second child in, I think, 1973. And the amount of money that we were able to make, they basically lost their job at the university because the theatre department, again, sorry, UWM, this is long ago, it's not the current department by any means, said to Conrad Bishop, you're much more interested in and focused on your Theatre X thing than you are on our department, so goodbye.

Jeffrey: Oh, wow.

John: I know. So we were all living on not nearly enough money for anybody to live on and they were expecting their second child and they had to leave and go off on their own. So we lost really our leadership. Ron Gural was the other faculty member who stayed with the company, although he continued to teach at UWM and under the circumstances had to make sure that he paid more attention to UWM than to Theatre X. And he eventually got a job in the graduate program at Tulane University, which he took and left town.

So they were the three long time beginning people who were still with it when I joined, and then they left a couple at a time. By the time they left, it was pretty clear in the large group of people who we worked with, mostly young people and with different commitments to it, and in different times, it was pretty clear which handful of us really wanted to make this our life.

And we were sort of called in quotation marks, “the touring company,” because we agreed to live on next to nothing so that we could tour our work increasingly all over the country, because that was how we could make the most money in that period. If you did theatre—like we were doing ensemble-based, original theatre on matters that spoke to people about the times that we were living in a highly entertaining way and a combination of really intellectual, really avant-garde, really funny, because there were always collections of material that it was always called X Communication. We had, I don’t know, probably close to a hundred pieces over the years that we made, that we could put different shows for different settings, different time lengths, indoors, outdoors.

Jeffrey: X Communication came back every season, or not every season, but frequently to create those….

John: And it was even more of a tour show than it was a local show. Locally we did other things, made longer pieces, original works. Occasionally did things like Offending the Audience by Peter Handke. As far as I know, we were the first company in the United States of America to do a production in English of Offending the Audience by Peter Handke. We also did The Ride Across Lake Constance a little bit later. That was after these leadership left. But anyway, so when the people who had been the main forces were, we knew were going, the whole group of people who had been connected with Theatre X actually voted that the handful of us, the so-called tour company who were making our lives taking this work all over the country because colleges wanted this kind of theatre in the way now that they might book a hip-hop group or a rock group or something on tour at the university.

The students even would book it. This kind of cool new theatre was popular at universities. And so we would do workshops. The university would pay us a substantial amount of money to do workshops in their theatre departments, although sometimes the faculty didn't want us to come near their theatre department or we would just perform and we would throw everything into a van, including ourselves because it was basically some lights and us and simple costumes and some props. That was what we had. And we would drive from city to city to city, all of that money would go into a bank. We had the entire three-story warehouse building in downtown Milwaukee, which is now a popular bar-drinking nightlife district on Water Street.

We had an entire three-story building and basement for almost no rent. And we had, the utilities were paid as well, because the owner of that building had owned the Yellow Cab company next door. And since we were a nonprofit group, he could use all of that as a tax write-off and did, and he was also an arts lover, so it didn't cost us very much to have all this space. And we brought in an art gallery, we brought in a small press bookstore. We invited other people who were touring around the country to come to Theatre X's theatre on Water Street to bring their work there. And then they could keep, we take 20 percent of whatever they brought in themselves from tickets, and they could have the rest and local groups in town, dancers, theatre groups, musical groups. It became a place for independent, small sort of fringe. It became a fringe festival place in the city of much importance. We took everything we made in Milwaukee to Chicago.

We played at a theatre called The Body Politic in Chicago, which doesn't exist anymore, on Lincoln Avenue, but it was a really important alternative theatre place in Chicago. We had a good following there, and some Chicago person whose name I can't even tell you, was in contact with, at that time, a very famous theatre in Amsterdam called The Mickery Theater, founded by Ritsaert ten Cate on a barn on his farm outside of Amsterdam with some inherited money that he came into, who brought new theatre, alternative theatre, avant-garde theatre from England initially, not too far away from the Netherlands until he got the Dutch government to sponsor what he was doing so that he got federal money to travel around the world to see theatre that was happening anywhere in the world and make decisions about what the Dutch audiences should see. And that eventually led to a theatre in downtown Amsterdam, a big wonderful theatre that could be set up in all kinds of ways, a main theatre around a small theatre in the same building, all very flexible and very well-equipped.

And the groups that he would bring in from all over the world would perform for a couple of weeks in Amsterdam and then tour the Netherlands because it's Dutch taxpayer money, not just Amsterdam taxpayer money who are making it possible for this theatre to come. So the guy from Chicago told Ritsaert ten Cate in Amsterdam, you really need to see Theatre X because you would like them and you would want to have them. So unbeknownst to us, he was in the audience when we were playing in a storefront in Denver, and he saw our performance of a play called The Unnamed, a little horror show, very personally oriented horror show.

“What if I am the problem?” horror show. “I am the monster I am trying to fight.” And he went back to Amsterdam and he called somehow. I don't know how he even got the phone number, but he must have asked for it, but nobody knew who he was. So Flora Coker, who's an even longer time member of Theatre X than me, she's the longest time, at that time, surviving Theatre X member woke up in this house that we were crashing in, and he said in his very Dutch voice, this is Ritsaert ten Cate from the Mickery Theater in Amsterdam, and I would like you to bring your play to Amsterdam. And she was half asleep and she said, “what are you, crazy?”

“We barely have enough food to buy supper tonight, enough money to buy supper tonight. How do you expect us to bring our play to Amsterdam?” And he said, "Well, obviously we will pay you." And the next thing she did was come jumping up and down on top of me, I was still asleep, saying, “we're going to Amsterdam, we're going to Amsterdam.” And he brought us, and we had a second play ready by the time that happened called Razorblades, which was about the things that we were personally afraid of and very much in the style of X Communication, kind of, but very much true to the current company.

And since we had that with us and they had a small theatre that nobody was in, we said, oh, hey, can we show you this new thing? And he said, yeah, sure, we can get you an audience and we'll build at this company, which is in the main theatre doing their horror show, is doing this new thing in the upstairs theatre. So we did that, and then he said, “well, can we have that back in six months and put that in the main theatre?”

And so it went from there to the next thing was, “well, listen,” this is Ritsaert again. “I've seen so many productions all over the world. I have my own ideas of theater that I think should happen that doesn't yet exist.” So he started bringing people from different groups, different countries together and paying us good salaries and giving us a space and time to create original work of the sort that was sort of a vague idea in his mind, something that he wanted us to address.

And in fact, the play that you did with Quasimondo, An Interest in Strangers, was the first of three of a trilogy of plays that was inspired by him in the main theatre at the Mickery. His theme was, how to respond to the daily news and he asked us to make our play in the lobby, which had a bar in it. It was a substantial lobby, and as he wanted it in very Brechtian fashion, he wanted his audiences to hang out in the lobby at the bar after they had seen something in the theatre and talk about what they had seen. And sometimes he'd have somebody come out and talk with them, or to them. So this time they came out of the theatre right into the beginning of An Interest in Strangers, our play. I mean, we made it possible for them, walk along the side and leave, but most people saw, oh, there's a second act here.

And they stayed. And then that led to... Because that brought up two possible responses, suicide and terrorism. So then he said, all right, now I want you to make a play about suicide and a play about terrorism. So as the years went by, eleven years all together, I became what was called an out-of-resident playwright for his projects. We brought more of our own projects over there. We made more original projects there right up until just before the Mickery closed and things in America drastically changed. Touring was drying up like crazy. We couldn't make our living doing that anymore.

Jeffrey: Are we looking at like 1981, 2, 3 here?

John: Yeah. First of all, let's go back to the story here. In 1980, the guy from the Yellow Cab company closed down the Yellow Cab company, closed his business, sold the warehouse. The person who bought the warehouse wanted us to pay what it was really worth in terms of rent, which we couldn't do. One of our members who was functioning as a sort of business manager, this is another story, was involved with a couple of artists in town and the public school system trying to come up with a way for several small arts groups. We were still the only theatre company in Milwaukee, professional theatre company if you can call us that. We made our living that way. That was our life.

The Milwaukee Repertory Theater and Theatre X were the two theatres, but other small arts groups, how we could have a relationship with the school system that would be of benefit to the students in Milwaukee public schools, particularly high school students, and could use what was now on the east side an empty former Milwaukee Public high school, Lincoln High School. And it became then known as Lincoln School of the Arts, and they did bring some students back into it. They were. But first of all, they just gave us space. They gave us the gymnasium, but in case they might want to have the gymnasium back for students, we had to build our own floor over the gym floor so as not to hurt the gym floor. We built walls, we built a theatre inside the gymnasium, but it was extremely workable. And the audience came in through the school and down the stairs and we got it rent-free.

And in return we did workshops with students and visited classes and had students come to see our work. Amsterdam then led to further touring to Germany to Sweden where we were a couple times. We had a long time in Stockholm working, making an original play from scratch with a Swedish company like Theatre X in Stockholm. Toured Great Britain. That was in 1985. The British Arts Council had us tour Great Britain with the second to play off the trilogy. And so that. I think it was 1983 or we were hardly ever in Milwaukee. And our board, including Curtis Carter was looking for a way for us to have another theatre.

And this warehouse in the Third Ward. The Third Ward was on the verge of becoming a combat zone. There were a couple gay bars and not much else there. At night there was, aside from a couple of gay bars, sort of nothing else, dark streets, old warehouses, there was actually a shooting in one of the gay bars, one of the popular gay bars about a year before this and somebody was shot and that put an end to that club. And so that six story warehouse sat empty. Our board members managed to put together a group of investors who, again, because we were a nonprofit organization, got large tax credits so that we actually became owners officially of floors one and floors two of the warehouse.

And then each of the four investors had one of the top four floors that they could put their business in, do whatever they want. That sort of changeover was in 1984, and then we moved in 1985. We had to get special permission from the city because it didn't meet any building codes for a theatre. We needed several hundred thousand dollars to rebuild it so that it would meet all of those building codes.

The city kept granting us permission to use it until finally they wouldn't anymore. One of the members of our board of directors resigned as a board member. He was the president, actually, and bought it for the cost of bringing it up to code. And he became the owner of those floors, and we had to pay him rent, so that was hard. But he was still a friend. He then, and the other investors, sold it to another member of our board whose name was Colin Cabot of the blue blood Cabot family, sort of renegade member of that family who had moved to Milwaukee and taken over artistic directorship of the Skylight Music Theater.

And there was an empty lot beside our six-story warehouse. And the Skylight Music Theatre, which was even older than Theatre X, was in the basement, in a shoddy little place. And Colin said, “no, no, no, I want a theatre.” Colin decided to build the Cabot Theater attached to our warehouse, one of the most beautiful theatres in the city, and he raised the money to do that. And the Skylight bought our warehouse and became our landlords, and another theatre moved in, The Milwaukee Chamber Theatre, to help pay for the costs of the whole thing.

Meantime, gentrification had been going on through all of this, and the Third Ward was blossoming and blossoming and blossoming, and the costs, the property taxes went up and up and up and up and up, and the Skylights increased the lease that we had up and up and up and up until we lost the second floor entirely. And we had the first floor, and we had to share that with the Milwaukee Chamber Theatre, who used our small first floor theatre and with the Skylight Theatre, who also wanted to do stuff. And then the Skylight said, well, we can make a lot more money if we rent this theatre out to anybody who wants to use it in town. We can make more money than we're making off the wonderful lease that we're charging you to be a resident there. And so you can't rehearse in it anymore.

You can have a rehearsal space on the second floor and an office on the second floor, but you could only be in there for a week of tech and then for the week of your run, and then you have to get out. I got to say though, that while it was ours, we were also continuing to do what we had done in the Water Street theater and bring theatres from all over the country and from all over the city, music groups, and now increasingly Milwaukee theatre groups and having them pay again for rent-free or 20 percent of the box office or whatever, because it takes a really long time to make an original play. And so for us, it was just keeping the place alive, keeping people coming until we had something ready to present there. But then we had the space to make it in so we could. And it was a flexible black box space until the city said, what? You can't be rearranging the space like this. You're breaking building codes.

So they gave us three configurations that we could use. Increasingly, everything's being pressured in, so now the Skylight is in charge, the rent is going up. It's becoming increasingly expensive. We're getting older and older. Members of our longtime company needed more income than we were able to pay, although we were getting it up little by little. We needed a staff, a good business staff that we didn't have in order to get the kind of grants we needed from the city of Milwaukee, for example. We needed a full-time person who's doing that, who's keeping up with, it's not just writing a grant, but staying in contact with the granting agency to let them know that they're spending their money well, what you're doing with it and stuff.

Jeffrey: Did someone from the company just make that part of their job, part of their….

John: Well, initially we had. Initially we did everything and increasingly in order to do any artistic work. And some members of the company then actually joined Equity, which lifted our costs too. Because we had to make a deal with Equity because they could make more money working in equity companies, not even necessarily in Milwaukee, which meant that we had to schedule our work around when they were able to. So it was all money.

In the meantime, our board, which was very distinguished. Another thing that I want to say about Theatre X is that we really led the way on diversifying our organization in every aspect. But this again, was complicated because the original group in the long-time ensemble, we were completely white, and it became very important to us before any other theatre in Milwaukee, I have to say, particularly to put Black people on the stage, but also Latino, Asian people in our cast to involve them in the making of the plays so that they could speak from their hearts about what's going on in their life.

Anyway, our very hardworking board, very hardworking business people said, look, what we need is to have a national search for a major managing director for this company. And for that to happen, that managing director has to have a say in the artistic decisions that are being made because they will influence what money comes in, what tickets are sold. The hint was already out there that I understood and understand, and that is that Theatre X man, you've been doing this for thirty years. Everybody in Milwaukee... Oh, not another Theatre X production, not another play by John Schneider.

And I mean, that idea was around there too. I mean, they liked that we were diversifying, and they liked that they were seeing new faces all the time and new artistic forces coming into… what we were doing. And so they wanted that to expand. And I was very sympathetic to that. I mean, as much as I could be. I actually took a leave of absence when they hired their first managing director because this managing director pulled me aside and said, the board thinks you should back off because it's John Schneider, John Schneider, John Schneider.

Just sort of see what else we can come up with. I said, right. So I took a job at a, what do you call those things? A temp agency, which actually gave me time to write. And that's when I started writing about the African-American history of Milwaukee. So when I came back, I had the first of a trilogy of plays about the African-American history of Milwaukee, and then it included the history of Jews in Milwaukee, which also is really interesting and important, persecuted groups in Milwaukee, how they became so important to the fabric of the city. So those are the plays I brought back with me.

Jeffrey: In what year is this temp agency period?

John: Oh, God. The late nineties.

Jeffrey: Late nineties when this managing director, programming started. Okay.

John: Yes. The mid-nineties, it started. Well, this managing director turned out... Welcomed me back. Said, oh, thank God you're back. He'd been having a really hard time without me. And in fact, the whole company had been so, thank God you're back. He said, and this show’s another big hit, and people were flocking to them, and we had audiences we hadn't had before. The one about the history of jazz in Milwaukee, which African-Americans played a big role in it. We turned the theatre, somehow we got permission from the city to let us get rid of a whole part of the seating and turn it into a nightclub and to recreate one of the inner city nightclubs in Milwaukee that was the center of jazz in Milwaukee, and to have great jazz artists performing as part of the show. So they were glad to have me back.

Well, then it turned out that this managing director had been taking the tax bills from the state of Wisconsin and hiding them in a drawer in his desk and not telling anybody. And so suddenly we were faced with a gigantic tax bill to the state of Wisconsin. The board fired that managing director immediately and proceeded to search for a second one. And this kind of blew up the longtime membership of the company. And the board now thought it was really important to keep me around. And the board and this new managing director agreed that now some of these other longtime members who'd been there for a long time should take a leave of absence like I had done and to get more faces up there. And those other members of the board of directors were already very, very angry with the board of directors for even having gotten that first managing director, for believing that they or anybody else could have that big of a say in what was originally a collective, who did everything, was going to do with their professional lives.

I said, but we are now at a level in what we're doing and in terms of the costs of what we're doing and in terms of the people that we need to do this, to continue to do this, to have this theatre, whatever it costs that we built that serves us well, and to have this grant money coming in from all these different sources and patrons and all of this history and hardworking board and stuff. And I tried to hold the whole thing together. And eventually it blew up in a pretty nasty way between the board and other members of the company who got a lawyer who tried to argue that the board had no right to do the things that it was doing. And of course, the board had every right, because they're the people who would have to pay that tax bill, for example, who are the board of directors.

The community board is ultimately responsible. So maybe that's not the way to go if you want to be an independent collective theatre, maybe you can't become in the course of thirty-some years such a part of your community with such expenses, with such costs. We couldn't make by touring anymore because the touring didn't exist like that anymore. And nobody was touring like that anymore. And so that began a war between a few of the company members and the board. And I tried to hold it all together and keep it going. And Flora Coker stayed with me and tried to do that too. And we hung on for another year, pretty ugly year in town in which everybody in the theatre in the city, which by that point no small thanks to us, was now a pretty large group. In fact, a remarkably large number of theatres in Milwaukee for a city of our size in the country.

And it's really important that people know that, that people increasingly recognize Milwaukee as a center for the arts in the United States of America, which it is in terms of the quality of what it does here and the amount of what it does here. And it's also important that the city of Milwaukee recognize that. And we were very, very important on both of those fronts. Our board just said, finally, this is too hard. Let's call it quits. And it was very hard for the board president to meet with me and Flora and say, our board has decided to leave.

And by that time, these other members of the company weren't speaking to me anymore or to Flora because they thought we had sided with the enemy, I'm sorry to say, and that I have never gotten over that. That's a source of pain to me twenty years later, and I hope that someday there's a remedy for that. And I see that it moves, that we make little steps in that direction. And that's how Theatre X sunset it. The board said, we're going to close it down. And they did. So ultimately, you could say it was money that killed an important—not just in Milwaukee or even in the country according to that book, or even in the world—collective ensemble, alternative theatre. It was the cost of operating one.

Jeffrey: Through everything you said, John, I was just constantly noting how things just eroded. This kept coming away. The city took this away, the board took this away, this control was taken away, this financial aspect was taken away. And that's kind of the heartbreaking thing. Now with perspective, we can maybe think that, but in the moment, it feels like every decision's made for the right reason in the moment, right?

John: Well, that's the source of the pain that I feel about the breakup with a couple company members. Because we had always said, oh, okay, so now what do we do? And I understand this, that anger that continues to some degree, I'm sorry to say, from the point of those other people toward me was because they said, well, okay, so let's go back to the living room.

Let's go back to making a play in the basement. Let's go back to how we started the ensemble company we once were, making plays from scratch with whatever we could find. We'll find grant money, we'll find people to help us. We have a good reputation as artists. And I don't know that I shouldn't have said, yes, let's do that. But at the time, I felt like, oh God, I can't.

Jeffrey: Because as you said, as you age, you have other financial responsibilities and you need a certain income. And if you go back to the way you were working twenty, twenty-five years ago of like, yeah, we can do this with our van—

John: We'd given up everything,

Jeffrey: Right?

John: Except our history.

Jeffrey: Yeah. So I can hear in all of that a lot of financial and social conflict in there. Certainly.

John: There are other Milwaukee groups I know that have had similar problems with their boards that have hurt them and closed them down, but it does center around money. It does center around the fact that to be a nonprofit professional group, you need a board of directors, a community board of directors, and by law, they are responsible financially to the organization. And so they have to take that seriously.

Jeffrey: Can I go back just for a second to how did you develop the board of directors, and then a board of directors has to be on board with your vision. They have to really love what you do. And it sounds like to begin with, they provided this space for you and did such lovely work and effort for you. And then somewhere along the line there, it sounds like financial support or something else overtook the other obligations. How did that board develop or change or change their focus throughout?

John: A little fun part is that the first member of our board of directors who was not a company member—the company and the board were the same people initially—in our nonprofit was Sarah O'Connor, who was the managing director of the Milwaukee Repertory Theater, and very much helped build it to the building it's got today and the company that it is today, and who wanted to help us. In fact, her son did tech work for us. He was our lighting guy for quite a while.

Jeffrey: Oh, cool.

John: Her young son. And she helped us begin to get grants and stuff. That was really great. And then the second member of our board was a woman of some wealth who had moved here from New York City and who loved the off-off-Broadway movement in New York City, and was very excited that there was anything like that here in Milwaukee that you could come to. And of course, they loved what we did and they didn't want us to change. We got, early board members were people on the city council, for example, who thought it was important for the city of Milwaukee to have this.

They were, as you say, people who wanted us to do exactly what we were doing. It was only as the expenses, I guess, grew as we needed a couple people in the office, not just a business manager, but a publicity marketing development person, a grant person, a little bit bigger company, even to share the artistic responsibilities. That it just came with board expansion, I think. I don't think anybody joins board because they wanted Theatre X to be something different, but when they saw that it cost more, we needed more money, and they were trying to figure out how to raise that money since they were responsible for it, I think that's when they began to push.

That's, I think, when the idea of you have to do in addition to what you're doing, other things, more kinds of things. And because as I said, you can't just crank out a next original ensemble based project while we were bringing other people in... Most people we were bringing in, as I said, we're getting the money for that, and we couldn't invite people to use our space and then take all the money that they were making.

That wouldn't make any sense. So ultimately, it keeps coming back to money, and the board did get bigger and bigger and bigger. It did. More board members invited more board members to join, which meant, in a sense, training the board toward what we did. But it also meant the board having more ideas about what Theatre X might do that would excite more people to come and more people to want to give money. And I, in the end, was the only board member who was attending board meetings because other the people were so angry with the board that they wouldn't set foot in the boardroom for the meetings.

So there was a war going on and there were unfortunate things that happened in that respect too, personal fights between board members and company members that I'm not even sure ever the people who were involved even knew the consequences on both sides... Since I was on both sides, I would hear the consequences of those fights, and I'm not sure that people involved in them even knew how much they mattered.

Jeffrey: It's just interesting to me how it does take a lot of time to create ensemble-based work. And as soon as we try to put ensemble based work in a world that is like a quote-on-quote traditional theatre process, Milwaukee Rap or Chamber Theater presently or otherwise, the finances of it are so much more crucial. And maybe in that moment, what we don't realize is it takes a long time to create ensemble-based work. It also takes a long time to write a grant. It takes a long time to write the script that you've got. It takes a long time to cultivate the relationships. Right?

John: Exactly.

Jeffrey: So that human power, there's a limit to actual human life and capacity to be in those rooms and be talking to the right people and be writing the right things for the right monies and all of those things.

John: Playwriting is rewriting. I tell my playwriting students. But the point you just made is excellent. The board members, as they came in, what they had in their own minds is the repertory theatre model. That's what they understood theatre operation to be. And so that's what they were trying to, without understanding, as you say, of the amount of time that it takes to do any aspect of that. Without understanding that at all, and without having any other idea of how to operate a theatre. So they kept pushing Theatre X in those directions. Yes.

Jeffrey: A big sigh from the both of us.

John: And I don't know what the solution is except to stay poor and be your own board or have another job to support yourself. Be a starving artist all your life, which is what I am again, and pushing seventy-five.

Jeffrey: Yeah. Yeah. Oh my gosh. John, thank you for bringing us from beginning to end there in such a succinct way, but that encapsulated so much. I want to go back to you bringing in other theatres a little bit. So in your second space that you were in, your six-story warehouse that you were in, you said you were bringing in acts in theatres and performances from all over the place. How did Theatre X or folks from, or yourself, how did you find folks to bring into that space who might've been touring or looking for a place to tour in Milwaukee here?

John: Word got around, I guess. SITI played in the original space, by the way. Yeah. Word got around, I mean, we were friends with Mabou Mines, for example, and the Wooster Group …. Everybody sort of knew everybody. David Herskovits, what's the name of his theatre in New York? He's still running it….

Jeffrey: David Herskovits. I'm trying to wrap my brain around that right now.

John: Yeah, I know. I am too. And he was just in the New York Times. He just opened a new piece, an adaptation of something. He was here. He brought something here because he was a friend of a friend and heard about it. And yeah, we didn't send out messages—do you want to come and play in our theatre? It just became possible. Especially in what's now the Broadway Theatre Center. The warehouse in the Third Ward was mostly local because there was so much possibility for local groups who were eager to use it. Because it was well-equipped, and it still is. It's the studio theatre of the Broadway Theatre Center. And it's used by Milwaukee Chamber and other groups, and even occasionally by the Skylight.

Jeffrey: I think we were still talking about in the eighties. And in that same sort of building, you were talking about how touring was starting to dry up, as you said. Can you talk a little bit more about that and what led to that? Or do you have a sense of that?

John: Well, I don't know where the cart before the horse, where to put it, but there was, in our big touring years in the seventies, as I said, a real excitement on the part of colleges and universities all over the country to bring this kind of theatre in, because it was the cutting edge, to use an old phrase, of what was happening in theatre in America. And because it spoke to a large degree about the issues that the students were grappling with or about to face or currently facing being drafted if you were a man, for example. And then that phase in American history and in the history of theatre in America passed, and the interest of universities and colleges started to shift too, and maybe they didn't have the money to bring theatre companies in anymore. Maybe they just could bring in speakers or whatever. Or like I say, rock bands, I think is what kind of replaced us in terms of what universities were bringing in as entertainment.

And so it used to be that we would go to these college booking festivals that were in different parts of the country for different regions of the country, where representatives from different colleges would all come and you'd apply to be able to audition personally. And we often got accepted, so we could actually do a little bit of our work for all of these college representatives. And otherwise, you'd have your stuff at a table in a big conference room, and they could walk around and you could talk with them about what you were going to do and what you might do, and they could see photos of your work and stuff.

And so we would book tours that way. And that stopped happening. Those colleges stopped having those things, or at least as far as we knew, they stopped. Maybe it's because we were spending so much time in Europe that we weren't paying attention to it anymore or something. But touring also dried up in Europe. The Mickery closed in 1990. It lasted twenty-five years. So that kind of touring that the Mickery put us on wasn't happening the way that it had been. At least not in those countries of Northern Europe where enough people spoke English that we could perform for them.

Jeffrey: Yeah, I think the arts were under more scrutiny too, right?

John: Oh my God, yes. Thank you for bringing that up.

Jeffrey: Yeah.

John: Oh, yeah. What's his name?

Jeffrey: What are arts dollars going towards if it's this avant-garde trite, right?

John: The NEA Four who had their grants taken away, three of them being LGBTQ performers and the fourth one taking her clothes off. Yes, absolutely. They tried to shut down the NEA completely. The Republicans in Congress. That was the beginnings of the Tea Party. Yes, that was very painful. And that hurt us, by the way, because we depended a lot on our National Endowment for the Arts grant, which shrunk after that happened. I worked for the National Endowment for the Arts for a long time too. Theatre X got excellent reviews when we were writing grants. And so I was invited to be a site reporter and a screener for the playwrights, and eventually I was on the playwriting panel.

And any and all the independent artist panels were completely obliterated. Only institutions were able to apply for grants from the NEA. And no longer could you apply as a playwright, for example, or a composer. And one of the reasons was because nonprofit institutions have community boards of directors who are supposed to control your institution to make sure you don't strip on stage and stuff or do anything that will offend community standards, which is what the Supreme Court in 1990, I think, decided was the determining factor. Each community could set its own standards of decency, and anybody who broke them was subject to fine or imprisonment or whatever the community wanted to do to them.

Jeffrey: Oh, sounds like a time to bring in a managing director.

John: Yeah. There we go. There we go. Thank you for pulling that thread in.

Jeffrey: That's what we're here to do, John, putting it all together, tying this quilt together.

John: Oh, great. I hope people who are listening to this are recognizing and it's helping make more sense of their lives.

Jeffrey: I hope so too. I think we're all in context. So many ensembles in the seventies, and the genesis of Theatre X was that you were creating because there were social issues that needed to be talked about, and a draft and Vietnam, and there are waves of these social justice sort of theatremaking in the form of ensemble or collective. And it might've been like San Francisco Mime Troupe and whatnot.

John: That was another big influence. Yes.

Jeffrey: And then we go into and then we lean into, and then we're coming into this period that we're talking about, the seventies and whatnot. And then companies in the nineties, I mean, we could talk about how many waves or where the waves are, but I think it's really fascinating because it feels like whenever there's a big cultural touch point, there's the inspiration for a new means of theatremaking. And I think that's really fascinating that Theatre X sort of rose out of that with a social justice aspect or improv around an issue.

John: Because our lives were deeply involved with that stuff. Civil Rights and LGBTQ and women's rights and Vietnam, of course, which was the worst of what was happening at that time in our lives.

Jeffrey: And that was all improvised to start with. And did you continue improv?

John: Yeah. The improv sessions were whatever they would be. We are Theatre X, we don't know what we are. Once they committed themselves to making a performance, a way of working developed, which did last for years and years, which was eventually, we called them concerts. Each of us was responsible to come up with some kind of live presentation that we could give to the rest of the group that in some way addressed whatever vaguely and increasingly specifically theme or subject, we decided that we wanted to use as a springboard to whatever was next, and that would certainly give me, as the writer, ideas about what was possible to put on stage because we'd be doing it.

And then the individual ideas that each member individually would bring in, a seed for something. Then we would break, we would all become groups for each of those ideas that the group thought had something going for it, and we would try to develop that as a kind of a group ensemble thing. Again, this is feeding me ultimately as the writer, and then I would go home and I would go for long walks and I would tear my hair out and then I'd write something that was based on that, that might be very true to that or might be really my own inspiration.

And in response to that, I consider myself a playwright, not just a recorder of something. And so that would be my concert, my next contribution to where we were going. But then I had my company try that, respond to that, have ideas about that. Say, oh, I think I really like this. What if this happened or could more happen here or something? And then I could go back and then I could expand on that and I could put new things into that of my own accord. So I was really writing in relation to the ensemble.

It didn't stay that way all the way to the end, again, because of what was happening to us structurally and so forth, but aspects of it did. And now I got to say too that other members of the company also contributed as playwrights, and we did their work also. We didn't only do plays that were written by me and they also worked collectively. One of them was Mark Anderson, who's still in Milwaukee with a company called Theater Gigante, which of all of the existing Milwaukee companies is the closest to something like Theatre X used to be in terms of its international connections and work and its experiments, its purpose. Isabelle Kralj comes from dance theatre and Mark Anderson comes from performance art and a guy named David Schweizer, who's got a good reputation in New York as a director came and was a member of our company for seven years and directed a lot of stuff.

Jeffrey: It seems that breaking the fourth wall was a theme within your work quite often, and I'm wondering how that maybe came about. That's a particular field of fascination for me because so much of clown is that, and so much of Boal is that, and so much of that sort of work breaks the fourth wall, and it really exciting to me.

John: The early work, the X Communication, the short pieces were, in style, extremely performative. And so as actors, we often were using clown techniques. We thought of ourselves that way as opposed to Stanislavski-based realism, although we did do that too. It was a mix of styles. We did do some improvisations too that my mind is again jumping all over. So I would say that from the beginning, even from before the first time I saw Theatre X, puppetry was also part of it. They did puppets very early on before I joined, and then repeatedly, for a few times after that, we did puppet stuff. So it's very geared toward breaking a fourth wall.

It's very conscious always of the fact that you're playing for an audience, and I think the radical thing in my life, in that respect, so that I stopped taking it for granted the way that I had was Offending the Audience by Peter Handke, which we staged in an immersive way in our theatre that we could set up however we wanted. So we had immediate face-to-face access with almost every individual in the ninety-nine seat audience. And every time before we would go out, the four of us would hug each other really, really tight because we never knew what would happen, how the audience would react to our provocations and things would happen. Like a woman one time got up out of the audience and started kissing me, put her mouth on my mouth to try to stop me from talking. And our one rule was that we would accept anything that happened, shouting, walking out, jumping up and down, anything that the audience wanted to do in response to us, but we would keep doing the show, whatever it was.

So that, really, I had never been in such a position before and that was a really important play in my life in terms of what is possible to do on stage.

Jeffrey: That series of three plays you talked about, sorry, An Interest in Strangers being the first among them, which, as you mentioned, so Quasimodo and we did that over the pandemic and we did a staging of that, so in 2022, it was my delight to be able to bring that out as a play that we did over Zoom throughout the pandemic. Why I think it worked so well is because it was a commentary on media and here we are inside of a medium of screens and we're sort of reporting on the reporting and I'm really thrilled that I found that play in the moment that I found it and was like I knew of it and I actually carried your book around. That book of three plays around for a very long time.

John: I know.

Jeffrey: Before I even knew. And then for our audience, yes, we had a coffee a while, much prior to the pandemic, and—

John: You pulled that book out and I couldn't believe it.

Jeffrey: I will repeat what I think I said to you at that coffee is that there was something when I read through those plays, that there was something that was speaking to the moment that we were in, knowing now that it was a trilogy, this is form and content that resounded with me.

John: Thank you.

Jeffrey: Something resonated. I immediately sensed that the theatre that you were making in that moment was something that I was really excited about and interested in doing, and I desired to make a part of my practice. And so this is a very long preface to saying: what gave rise to putting those plays into a published format? How did that happen?

John: A publisher in Amsterdam, an American actually who had moved to Amsterdam and started a publishing company and saw the, I don't know, maybe it was just that first one, but I think he saw maybe the second one too, I think, it was after the second one. He became a friend and he was a fan and he said, "Hey, I would really like to publish your..." He must have known about the third one too though, so maybe. Anyway, he said, "I would like to publish your plays." And did. I don't know how many, a thousand copies of that book or something, existed. They were available in Milwaukee for a while at the Woodland Pattern, which is the bookstore that began in the lobby of Theatre X's first theatre on Water Street that we invited to have this small press bookstore.

The third play, Acts of Kindness was done during the pandemic in the first year of the pandemic, I think, at the University of South Wales in Cardiff. And the guy who directed it was on the faculty and had seen us when we toured in 1985 with the second play, and we were in Swansea, Wales. Played at the university there, and he loved it so much that somehow he got a hold of that book and like you, hung onto it, and he did the one on suicide, which really resonated with those students in Wales, in Great Britain, in the pandemic and the financial disasters that came at that time and Boris Johnson.

There were many reasons for those students to feel depressed. And so the possibility of responding to the daily news, and that was the most emotional, I would say, of the three plays. Of course, because it's about suicide and the characters spoke very, very personally and not ironically, not cynically, not tragicomically about survival or not.

And it has in it a beautiful ancient Greek suicide dance according to a legend in which the women whose men were killed in the Trojan war or something or in some sort of warring thing and who were imprisoned by the Persians or whoever imprisoned the Greeks at that time, quietly commit suicide by dancing on this edge of a cliff.

And one by one, they would move a little closer to the cliff and one by one the line would fall off the cliff and the rest would hold the attention of the captors so that they wouldn't notice that they were all committing suicide one by one before their eyes. And then those bodies, those of us who danced that dance form, then the shore of a lake and the two central characters who are wrestling with whether to live or die, walk along the shore and stand on the edge of the water and help each other and the central character played by Flora. The last line is she says to him and takes his hand and she says, “do you mind if we just walk on?” See, you might want to do that one someday.

Jeffrey: Yeah.

John: Sorry.

Jeffrey: No, thank you.

John: So I got to talk to the students via Zoom, the students in Wales. And they cared a lot about it, so.

Jeffrey: I feel like we covered the waterfront here. Anything else we didn't get a chance to say? Anything else?

John: No, except thank you. I love you for doing that play, for keeping my book all these years and for asking me to have this conversation. It's a part of my life that's often seems like a dream to me now. And thanks to you, it came alive again. So much so that I wind up in tears.

Jeffrey: Well, John, I mutually appreciate and thank you for your time and sharing your story and your perspective on how things unfolded and whatnot, and gosh, when I first moved to Milwaukee, I had no idea what I was getting myself into and the community that I was finding here and finding my life here and finding you for coffee was such a wonderful beginning to my outlook on how theatre can be made here in Milwaukee, and so it's really meant a lot to me to have you in my life presently. So thank you so much. It really means a lot.

John: They say the perfect end is to bring it back to what's happening in the city of Milwaukee, so thank you for that.

Jeffrey: Okay. John, thank you. I love you and I love our time together. Thank you so much. John was one of the first people I met when I moved to Milwaukee because as we mentioned in the conversation, I found a copy of Theatre X's published play scripts in a Chicago-used bookstore. I bought it because how awesome and rare is it to find a ensemble theatre company with published scripts. Since I met John, I've considered him a very important figure and friend. We did a Zoom version of his play Intimacy with Strangers, which was one of the triad he spoke about, and we had a panel discussion afterwards featuring some folks from Theatre X and Philip Arnoult, who was a huge advocate for their work in that period. John mentioned so many things that are echoes of what we've heard so far this season, especially from Deb Margolin in episode five from socially-minded work to producing at and within universities.

Their touring company was booked at university theatres because they were doing the cool avant-garde pieces equating to what was a rock show. Very soon this season, we are going to hear from folks at the University Musical Society of Ann Arbor, where they're in the market of presenting programs of challenging and unapologetic work. This also brings me back to my episode in season three with Jawole Willa Jo Zollar, who has just announced her final show at the time of this outro recording, who talked about the lack of export of American culture and the lack of festival culture in the United States because there is no money for it. But we should also highlight Ritsaert ten Cate's point of view of how important it is to bring different countries together to bring their points of view to one another. Another tie to Jawole who said that at Jacob's Pillow, they were taking classes together, they were learning from one another.

That's what a festival can and should be. Cultural connection. They became a bit of a landlord over the Broadway Theater Center, which is not altogether unique. Often when you hear about theatres sharing spaces, they end up becoming more of a business than an art, but they kept things moving, right. This detail is a bit anecdotal, but I knew someone who ran the Z Space in San Francisco, and they voiced similar frustration of managing the space instead of working in the space. I want to point out here too that there's a major connection to the board member that buys their warehouse in 1983. It sounds very much like how Theatre de la Jeune Lune lost their space in the early 2000s. Also, I can't avoid pointing out the similarity they share with Lookingglass Theater Company, where they hired a full-time staff person before they paid themselves as artists. David Catlin mentions this last season as well.

Finally, John mentions how this work fed him as a playwright. The collaborative work made him a better writer. We're actually going to hear from Jaclyn Backhaus at the end of this season who also was a playwright in a theatre ensemble. That creative part just happens to spark more in the creatives.

Okay, I think we're starting to see some themes here. Thanks for hanging on to all of those with me, y'all. As I mentioned, these footnotes will be on the episode's transcript page at howlround.com, so please check it out. And that's it for me this time. Join me next time as we keep the Milwaukee train going with a conversation with Mark Weinberg from the Center for Applied Theatre. He's going to steep us in all things Boal, especially how it connects internationally. We'll be looking at how the core tenets of applied theatre relates to the deeper themes of ensemble-based work. Thanks, artists. We'll catch you next time on From the Ground Up.

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